stella proposals
Review what stella wants to remember long-term, see the evidence behind each idea, and keep, edit, ignore, or retract it.
stella proposals is where you review ideas from stella's adaptive-context loop, the part of stella that reflects on your work and suggests things worth remembering long-term. As you work, it looks back on your turns and creates proposals: things it thinks are worth keeping. This command shows you each pending proposal and the evidence behind it. You can accept it, change its wording, or turn it down, all before it affects how stella behaves.
Every decision you make is saved as a permanent record. This means the full review history can always be replayed exactly, and choosing "ignore" can be undone later; it isn't final. This command works offline. It only reads and writes to .stella/private/context.db, and it doesn't need an API key.
Synopsis
stella proposals list [--all] [--limit <n>]
stella proposals keep <id> [--reason <text>]
stella proposals edit <id> <body> [--reason <text>]
stella proposals ignore <id> [--reason <text>]
stella proposals retract <id> [--reason <text>]
stella proposals refreshWhat it does
stella never changes its own behavior silently. It can only propose changes. A person decides whether to adopt them, and that decision is recorded. That's why every command here asks for a reason, and why nothing is ever deleted. A decision with no reason can't be checked later, and a decision you can't revisit isn't really a review.
For stella to create a proposal, the same idea must show up across different tasks, not just many times in one task. If one task mentions something twenty times, that counts as one piece of evidence, not twenty.
stella proposals list
Show pending proposals with the evidence behind each.
--allInclude proposals that have already been decided on, not just the pending ones.
--limit <n>Maximum proposals to show.
Default 20
stella proposals list
stella proposals list --all --limit 100stella proposals keep
Accept a proposal exactly as written. It then becomes active guidance for stella, at "advisory" strength, meaning stella treats it as a suggestion rather than a strict rule.
<id>RequiredThe proposal's candidate id, as shown by list.
--reason <text>The reason you're keeping it. This is saved with the record.
Default kept from the review surface
stella proposals keep cand-3f21 --reason "matches how we actually release"A rule proposal mined from stella's own reflections is turned down at the last step, and the command says so. A rule steers every later turn, so it costs a measured result: an exit status, a build, a number. A reflection is the model's own read of its run, which does not pay. Your decision is still recorded, and the proposal stays in the list.
stella proposals edit
Accept a proposal but change its wording. Your replacement text is what stella keeps long-term. The original wording stays in the record too.
<id>RequiredThe proposal's candidate id.
<body>RequiredThe replacement text.
--reason <text>The reason for the edit.
Default edited from the review surface
stella proposals edit cand-3f21 "Run \`make gate\` before pushing — not \`cargo test\` alone."stella proposals ignore
Decline a proposal. stella will not suggest it again while your decision stands. Because this is recorded as an event, not a deletion, you can change your mind later.
<id>RequiredThe proposal's candidate id.
--reason <text>The reason for declining it.
Default declined from the review surface
stella proposals ignore cand-7ab0 --reason "true last quarter, not now"stella proposals retract
Take back a rule you already accepted, so it stops guiding stella.
ignore stops a proposal from being written in the first place. retract undoes one that was already written. When you keep a proposal, it's saved as a file under .stella/rules/, and stella loads those files as part of its instructions.
Retracting a rule doesn't delete it. The rule's file stays on disk, but its status changes to retracted. The retraction itself is added to .stella/rules/promotions.jsonl, a tamper-evident log, along with who did it and why. After this, stella stops using the rule the next time it loads its instructions. Running stella context validate shows the rule as Retired instead of failing.
<id>RequiredThe rule's id, as shown by stella context list. If the short id matches more than one rule, use the full ctx.<set>.<id> form instead.
--reason <text>The reason for retracting it. This is required; an empty reason is not allowed.
Default retracted from the review surface
stella proposals retract migration-order-3f21 --reason "the migration order changed in 0.9"stella proposals refresh
Look through stella's reflection log and create proposals from it right away, without waiting for a new turn to trigger reflection.
stella already does this automatically after every reflection. This command exists so you can check for proposals on demand, without needing to run a new turn first. Running it more than once is safe: running it twice in a row makes no extra changes.
stella proposals refresh && stella proposals listSetting context.lifecycle.enabled: false in settings.json turns off this whole adaptive-context feature, including proposal creation.
Proposals vs. ingest
stella ingest and stella proposals are two separate systems with separate storage. stella proposals shows ideas stella noticed from your sessions, stored in .stella/private/context.db. stella ingest creates proposal files from documents you feed it, stored in .stella/proposals/, and you review those by editing the files directly. A document you ingest will not show up in stella proposals.