Summary

• Adds a paths section to mempalace.yaml with a level attribute (ignore, describe, full) for per-pattern mining control
• level: describe — creates a single drawer with user-provided description text instead of full content chunking
• level: ignore — skips the file entirely during mining
• level: full — default behavior, mine everything (implicit when no rule matches)

This replaces the binary mine-or-exclude model with three-tier awareness. Real-world test on a project with 849 files reduced drawers from 24,353 to 9,836 (60% reduction) by describing data files instead of chunking them.

Config format

\\yaml
paths:
'data/results/*.json':
level: describe
description: 'Experiment result JSONs — centroid tracking, spectral features'
'tests/':
level: describe
description: 'Pytest test suite'
room: testing
'pnpm-lock.yaml':
level: ignore
\\

Mining behavior

• describe: skip content chunking, create one drawer with [Path description] relative/path: description, tagged with \mining_level: describe\ metadata
• ignore: skip entirely, report count in summary output
• Patterns use fnmatch glob syntax (same as .gitignore)
• Respects mtime — only re-creates if description changed
• Room can be overridden per pattern or auto-detected

Test plan

• 25 tests pass (19 existing + 6 new)
• test_match_path_description_glob — glob matching and room override
• test_match_path_description_skips_non_describe_levels — full-level entries ignored
• test_mine_with_path_descriptions — end-to-end describe mining
• test_match_path_rule_ignore — ignore level flagging
• test_compile_path_rules_skips_full_and_invalid — validation
• test_mine_with_ignore_produces_no_drawers — end-to-end ignore mining

Resolves #981