Paths are labels, not identity

I do not want to memorize where a file lives. I want the thing — the feature, the doc, the asset — and I want renames to change the nameplate, not the wiring.

That is the connectome-fs bet: store associations as a graph; treat folder paths as a projection people can browse. It is also the HCI Nerdz claim for the public web: canonical URLs are for human convenience, not for functional dependency. People feel rename and URL rot first; the diagnosis is labels used as wires.

What breaks today

A docs URL gets pasted into another repo. Someone improves the path. Half the citations rot. Developers pay attention tax that should have been a pointer update — or never a string wire at all.

Package registries already track reverse dependents for code. Prose never got the equivalent. Connectome-fs wants reverse edges in the store itself.

The stack we agree on

  1. *Content identity (hash / node id) for “same thing”: \(Hash(Bytes_{old}) = Hash(Bytes_{new})\) when only the path moves

  2. Mutable human pointer for “current edition of this intent” after \(Hash(Bytes_{v1}) \neq Hash(Bytes_{v2})\)

  3. Reverse consumers for leftover labels on today’s web

  4. Redirects while the classical web remains string-shaped

A human-readable path label points to stable content identity, which carries semantic relationships

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