Derived Metadata

.scribekit/derived.json, beside session.json and review.json. Schema versioned from its first release and probed for its version before anything else is interpreted.

This is the only file ScribeKit writes on your behalf after a meeting has closed, and it is the only one on the writable side of the source/derived boundary.

Fields

Field	Meaning
schemaVersion	Probed before anything else is interpreted.
sessionID	The meeting this state belongs to.
revision	What the editor loaded, used to refuse a conflicting write.
notes	Your Markdown source, verbatim.
reviewedSpanIndexes	Which flagged passages you marked, sorted and deduplicated.
updatedAt	ISO-8601.

And nothing else. No transcript text, no confidence, no review reasons, no audio metadata, no source names: all of that stays in the artifacts that own it, and this file holds only what you decided. Because marks are stored sorted and deduplicated and dates are ISO-8601, the same state always serialises to the same bytes.

Identity by position

A mark is identified by spanIndex — the position review.json already numbers a candidate by, and the same index the transcript reader gives that span. Nothing is identified by wording.

A mark whose index no longer names a candidate resolves to nothing. It is never shown against another passage, and it is left in the file rather than discarded: a sidecar that has outlived a review record is not a licence to throw away what the user marked.

Four refusals

Each of these leaves the file exactly as it is, disables notes and marks for that meeting, and never overwrites anything:

1. Bytes that are not a record.
2. A schema version this build does not know.
3. A sessionID naming another meeting.
4. A revision that is not the one the editor loaded.

None of it is load-bearing. A meeting whose derived state cannot be read still lists, opens, previews, searches and plays exactly as it would otherwise, and History reports no problem for it — the detail pane says what was found and what ScribeKit refused to do about it.

Writes

Writes are atomic, so there is no partial derived.json. A reviewed mark is written as it is made; notes are written when you press Save — no debounce, no timer, no write per keystroke. Marking a passage writes the notes already on disk, not the draft; saving notes carries the marks already on disk through unchanged. "Saved" is only ever said after a write returned.

See Meeting Notes.