The ledger you can replay

Our home page has always shown the same diagram: an append-only event log on the left, a consolidation boundary in the middle, durable facts and graph structure on the right. Last week the founder noticed something uncomfortable about it: the product couldn't actually show you the left side. The data was all there — every turn, tool call, and outcome, timestamped, never rewritten — but the portal only displayed what it had become, not what it was. The marketing was ahead of the product by exactly one screen.

So we built the screen. The Provenance tab now lists every session in your ledger — imported conversations by title, live assistant sessions, Stream turns, nightly dream cycles — with event counts and time ranges. Open one and it replays chronologically: mono timestamp, event type, content, exactly like the diagram. Where consolidation extracted something from an event, a “distilled →” chip links to the fact it became, with its current confidence and validity window one click away.

The two-way walk is the part we care about. From any fact, you can already trace back to its source sessions; from any event, you can now trace forward to its distilled facts. When a memory looks wrong, the question “where did this come from?” has a clickable answer instead of a support ticket. And because the ledger is append-only — forgetting closes a validity window, it never deletes the record — the replay is complete even for memories you've since corrected or retired.

Imported history gets the same treatment as live conversations. A conversation you had with ChatGPT in 2024 replays with its 2024 timestamps, because imports preserve original dates. Your ledger is a record of when things actually happened, not of when you happened to install Smara.

One design decision worth stating: the ledger view shows the machinery — session ids, event types, importance scores — rather than hiding it behind a friendlier abstraction. The audience for a provenance view is someone who has decided to check the system's work. For that reader, the raw record is the feature. Smoothing it over would defeat the reason they came.

It's live now: Memories → Provenance. If you've imported your history, your oldest conversations are already there, dated the day you had them.