Is attention drift derived from ledger writes only, or from session metadata?

The personal tier's version of the orphan flag is attention drift: *"this week's sessions were 70% in skills repos — nothing there links to your stated focus."* That sentence requires knowing where time went, and there are two ways to know:

- **Ledger writes only.** Count entries created per ledger. Zero new data collected, nothing to leak. But it measures *capture*, not attention — a week of deep work that produced two decisions looks quieter than an hour of thrashing that produced nine. - **Session metadata.** Read session start/stop and cwd from the agent harness. Genuinely measures where time went. But dira begins recording a log of the user's working behaviour, which is a materially different privacy proposition for a tool that also holds their private strategy — and it is the kind of feature that is easy to add and impossible to un-ship.

There is a third option worth weighing: **don't build it.** Attention drift is the one proposed feature that is closer to self-surveillance than to navigation, and int-0003's subtractive discipline argues against it. A compass that reports your bearing is useful; one that grades your effort is a different product.

Not blocking anything — the personal tier ships without drift detection. Defer until the tier has been used long enough to know whether the mirror is actually wanted.

Answered 2026-08-09 by `dec-0027`

Settled by the founder. See that entry for the reasoning and what it rejected.