Research into Cognee's actual API (docs.cognee.ai) confirmed the
docs made a load-bearing false claim: that the Lore Engine
'inherits and generalizes' a Contradiction node, get_contradictions
tool, 8 inherited MCP tools, and neo4j-init.cypher from the substrate.
Cognee ships NONE of that. Cognee provides DataPoint + custom graph
models + remember/recall + a Cypher/APOC graph-rule pattern. So:
- Slice 2 (consistency) is a from-scratch BUILD, not a generalization
- Categories A/B/D (Contradiction/Anachronism/Orphan) are ours
- Category C (declarative OntologyRule) rides Cognee's Cypher pattern
- '8 inherited tools' -> '8 base tools' (one wraps cognee.recall)
- '7 inherited labels' -> '7 base types' (Lore Engine originals on DataPoint)
Fixed across 04-consistency, 01-ontology, 05-mcp-tools, 00-overview,
09-roadmap, 15-related-work, 16-comparison. Historical GraphMCP
comparisons left intact.
Added CONTEXT.md (glossary) — the grill-with-docs skill mandates it
and 6 ADRs' worth of resolved terms (Lineage/Faction/Region/Plane/
LoreSource/extraction+source confidence/disputed edge/retcon/Setting/
ConsistencyRun/Cognee) had no single home. New readers no longer mine
ADR prose for the vocabulary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
The /docs review surfaced two categories of work: real bugs and a
substrate decision. This commit lands both.
Pure fixes:
- Fix markdown table corruption in 01-ontology.md (3 `||` lines +
duplicate `### Magic, culture, language` header)
- Replace wrong tool/label/doc count claims with the real numbers:
30 -> 45 MCP tools, 14 -> 36 node labels, 14 -> 18 docs
- Resolve Phase 11 collision in 09-roadmap.md (v1.1 phases renumbered
to 4-7 in the unified plan; v1 Polish keeps its Phase 11)
- Propagate the v1.2 world_id -> Setting/Plane deprecation to the
v1.1 docs (11, 12, 14, 17): YAML world_id -> setting_id, Postgres
world table -> setting table, Cypher index renamed, migration
steps 6 + 7 added in 17-planes.md
Cognee substrate switch (the strategy change):
- 00-overview.md: substrate line now Cognee, not GraphMCP-Example
- 08-architecture.md: full system diagram, services layout, hosting,
and resource budget rewritten for Cognee as the substrate
- 11-extensibility.md: 4-layer diagram reframed (Cognee data-model
extension; template-watcher is a Cognee data-pipeline)
- 12-storage-strategy.md: 5 stores collapse to 3 layers; saga pattern
removed (Cognee handles cross-store transactions)
- 13-microservice-decomposition.md: full rewrite (Cognee is the
gateway; no monolith problem; 5+ Go services collapse to one
in-process Python extension)
- 14-examples.md: Example 6 added (full 8-step Cognee integration
walkthrough from "stand up Cognee" to "template-driven tool call")
- 15-related-work.md: Cognee reframed as substrate, not option
- 16-comparison.md: strategic section reframed (decision made, not
debate); the build order is now in 09-roadmap.md (Cognee-spike-first)
- 10-critique.md: S1.4, S1.5, S2.5, S2.6 status updated for Cognee
- 07-reasoning-harness.md: system prompt mentions Cognee + cognee.recall
fallback
- 06-ingestion.md: Path 1 (prose) via cognee.add/cognify; Path 2
(YAML) via Lore Engine parser; Go-worker section replaced
Build plan (09-roadmap.md): the v1+v1.1 work collapses from 43 days
on GraphMCP-Example to 33 days on Cognee. The MVP is end of Phase 3
(16 days): Cognee spike, typed ontology, time model, 45 MCP tools.
Phase 4-6 add the consistency engine, TypeTemplate polymorphic
extension, and reasoning-harness validation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Researched 9 systems in the KG-RAG + LLM-reasoning space, with actual
abstracts, GitHub stars, and arXiv citations:
- Microsoft GraphRAG (33,779 stars, arXiv 2404.16130) — global summarization
- Cognee (17,843 stars, arXiv 2505.24478) — agent memory, cognitive ontology
- LightRAG (36,622 stars, arXiv 2410.05779) — graph-based text indexing
- Stanford Generative Agents (arXiv 2304.03442) — memory stream + reflection
- IVIE (arXiv 2606.13348) — neuro-symbolic interactive-fiction generator
- WikiChat (arXiv 2305.14292) — Wikipedia-grounded, 97.3% factual
- TKG methods (TLogic, Chain of History, TGL-LLM) — temporal forecasting
- Chain-of-Knowledge (arXiv 2306.06427) — in-prompt structured reasoning
- Long Story Generation (arXiv 2508.03137) — KG for long-form narrative
Critical findings:
- The Lore Engine's 'closed-world fictional ontology' niche is not crowded.
No system does time-aware, contradiction-checking, source-attributed
reasoning over a fictional world. That's the opening.
- BUT: GraphRAG/Cognee/LightRAG are 18-37k-star production systems.
The Lore Engine is a design. Maturity gap is the single biggest weakness.
- The right move might be: build Lore Engine on top of Cognee, not
GraphMCP-Example. Cognee is MIT, production, has paying users, and
closes 80% of the substrate gap in 2 weeks of integration work.
- The most leveraged next move: 1-week spike to validate the core
idea before committing to the 43-day build.
16-comparison.md is the honest assessment. Where the Lore Engine is
Worse is a direct list of 10 weaknesses; where it's Better is a
direct list of 10 strengths. Six debatable design decisions called
out for Kay to push back on.
