---
name: verbatim-recovery-lives-in-authoring-transcript
description: "Recovering the verbatim text of a past inter-agent message — spt stores truncate/drop; the only full copy is the authoring session's CC transcript jsonl (or its scratchpad send-file). Also - a peer may \"remember\" a dispatch that never existed."
metadata: 
  node_type: memory
  type: project
  originSessionId: 11e4e7b2-f4a9-4540-a61d-2855d29522b7
  modified: 2026-08-19T14:24:17.471Z
---

When a peer asks for an exact resend of a past dispatch (2026-08-19, hertz post-restore):

**Where verbatim does NOT live:** `owlery/<id>/digest.log` truncates every body at ~201 chars
(preview only). `owlery/<id>/spool.db` holds queued-undrained messages, not delivered history.
Repo JIT/register files usually record that a message travelled, not its text.

**Where it DOES live:** (1) the AUTHORING session's CC transcript
(`~/.ccs/instances/<inst>/projects/<proj-slug>/<session>.jsonl`) — the `spt send` tool_use call
carries the full body; find the session by LastWriteTime bracketing the digest.log timestamp,
then `Select-String` for the target id or a distinctive phrase. (2) The authoring session's
scratchpad send-file (`Temp\claude\<proj>\<session>\scratchpad\to-<id>-*.txt`) when the body
was sent from a file. Note `/clear` keeps the session id but the jsonl restarts — pre-clear
turns live in the PREVIOUS session's file, not the current one.

**Why:** and the harder finding: hertz "remembered" an earlier dispatch with anchors that a
full send-history search proved NEVER EXISTED — a restore gap doesn't just drop messages, it
lets a queue-mention inflate into a remembered dispatch. Kin: [[commune-is-testimony-not-an-artifact]].

**How to apply:** exhaust digest (timestamps) → transcript jsonl (bodies) → scratchpad files,
in that order; if nothing exists, say so explicitly and issue a fresh AUTHORITATIVE dispatch
from the ruling records (as author you are not relaying) rather than letting the peer's
reconstruction stand.