How 803 private vault notes become a public-safe living graph — sanitized at the source, simulated in the browser.
The Brain module renders the Hermes vault as a force-directed graph — but the vault holds three privacy tiers, and only the Open tier may ever leave it. The pipeline enforces that structurally.
A Claude session with vault MCP access (typically the nightly refresh, when the connector is reachable) reads the vault's link structure and emits a sanitized snapshot: Open-tier notes only, edges kept only when both endpoints are Open, and no private identifiers of any kind. The snapshot is a single JSON file — 803 nodes, 1,871 links — that the console serves through one API route.
Everything visual happens client-side: a d3-force simulation lays the graph out fresh on every load, and the canvas renderer draws it with group-tinted links, focus neighborhoods, search, and filters. The vault itself is never touched by the browser — the graph is a shadow, cast deliberately.