Proposal: docs/markdown-adoption-guide.md — Atlas concepts as markdown discipline (no daemon required)

[dfrench222]

Rich — proposal, not a draft. Want your call before I write it.

The observation

Strategic Profits' audience is operators, not Python devs. The current Quick Start is docker compose up -d + Neo4j 5.26 + pip install -e ".[dev]". That's the right bar for someone running the full daemon. It's the wrong bar for someone who just wants the epistemic discipline Atlas encodes.

The Atlas concepts (4-tier confidence, signed evidence, core-conviction protection, decision lineage, stakes-routing) work as markdown frontmatter conventions BEFORE anyone touches Neo4j. A knowledge worker with Obsidian and a willingness to write structured frontmatter can adopt 70% of Atlas's value without spinning up a single container.

What the guide would cover

I'd write docs/markdown-adoption-guide.md with five sections:

1. The 4 confidence tiers as a frontmatter field — unstated_assumption / working_hypothesis / validated_belief / core_conviction, with the hysteresis rules from your spec (don't auto-flip on a single counterexample).
2. Signed evidence arrays — evidence_for: and evidence_against: lists with source + date, the human-graspable version of what Atlas does at the graph layer.
3. Core-conviction protection — the "block on auto-demotion" rule, why it matters, how to enforce it as a discipline before there's a daemon to enforce it for you.
4. Decision-lineage edges — every decision note links back to the supporting beliefs in its frontmatter. Read by humans, parseable by Atlas later.
5. Stakes-routing — stakes: low | medium | high as a routing field that tells future-you (or a future Atlas ingest) how much scrutiny this deserves.

Plus a final section: "When to graduate." Which Atlas concepts are achievable as markdown discipline (Tier 1) vs. which genuinely require the daemon (Ripple propagation, the SHA-256 hash chain, cross-stream contradiction detection — Tier 2). And the signal that says "you've outgrown markdown, time to stand up the real thing."

My qualification

I've been running this in my own life-wiki for ~12 days. Same concepts, markdown layer, no daemon. It's the lived-validation reference implementation — I can write the guide from operator experience, not theory.

The ask

Want me to contribute this? It fits the pattern of docs/QUICKSTART.md you already have. Strict scope: it would NOT relitigate Atlas's architecture or pitch markdown as a substitute for the real thing. It would explicitly position itself as "the on-ramp before you're ready for the daemon."

Say yes and I'll PR it. Say no and I'll keep it in my own vault.

— Donnie