RAW/ is the landing zone for files that are not ready to live in the garden yet.
Examples:
- markdown fragments
- screenshots and loose images
- PDFs and exported documents
- rough notes with unclear structure
The intended lifecycle is simple:
- Drop material into
RAW/. - Let agents digest it into
content/. - Review the resulting commit.
- Remove the processed source files from
RAW/.
RAW/ is intentionally outside Quartz’s published content tree. Search, explorer, backlinks, and graph view should reflect curated notes, not transient intake.
The most important transformation is usually not format conversion. It is choosing where the new material should connect: existing domain folders, nearby notes, and local maps are the main destinations.
One important boundary: published notes should not narrate the intake process. The fact that something came through RAW/ belongs in the workflow, review, and commit history, not in the note body or subject description.
Another boundary: links in published notes should resolve. Agents should only add wikilinks to notes that already exist in the garden or are being added in the same change.
When the atlas needs to change, agents should prefer extending an existing public domain before inventing a new root bucket. New top-level folders should name durable areas of thought, not temporary processing categories.