The details

Directive 47 can turn a session — or a week — into a readable log, written to plain markdown beside the executable so you can keep it, edit it, and post it wherever you like.

Elite’s community has been writing Commander’s logs by hand since 3300. This writes the first draft.

The one thing that leaves this machine

Everything else d47 does stays here. This does not — because you chose to take it. That is a different thing from telemetry, and it is worth saying plainly: d47 sends nothing anywhere on its own, and a log leaves only when you pick up the file and put it somewhere.

Every sentence traces to an event

This is the whole quality bar, and it is why the feature is not simply a prompt.

A model handed your journal will write a better evening than the one you had. It will promote a routine docking into a narrow escape, because that reads better and nothing stopped it. So the model is never handed your journal. It is handed a numbered list of facts d47 computed:

[3] (travel) 42 hyperspace jump(s), 1,204 ly in total, Shinrarta Dezhra out to Deciat.
[4] (mishap) Was interdicted by Ordo Vulpes, and submitted.
[5] (trade) Sold 640 tonnes across 9 sale(s) for 12,410,000 Cr, mostly Painite.

Every sentence it writes has to end with the numbers of the facts it rests on — [4], or [4,11]. When the log comes back, d47 reads it again and checks all of it. A sentence citing nothing came from somewhere other than your journal; a sentence citing a fact that does not exist is worse, because it looks like evidence. Both are marked in the file where they stand, counted in the header, and listed at the foot.

The brackets stay in the finished file on purpose. A Sources section that no sentence points into records nothing. Delete them before you post it — that is ten seconds of the editing this file already expects.

Nothing you or anybody else typed in game is ever part of it. ReceiveText and SendText have no handler at all, so a hostile message in an open system cannot travel into the largest prompt d47 assembles, or out of it into something you posted.

Whose log it is

Three voices, and they are not interchangeable.

The second is the one only d47 can do, which is exactly why it is the one you opt into rather than the one that happens to you the first time you press a button.

A log is d47 speaking at length, so it inherits the persona’s protection. With personality switched off, the ship’s-AI voice writes plainly rather than writing as somebody else, and the commentary voice loses its commentary. Either way the file’s header says which voice you asked for and which one actually wrote it.

What a log covers

The last session, today, the last seven days, or the last thirty. A session means since you last entered the game — not since the journal file started, because Elite rolls a long session into a continuation file without saying so.

Two exact dates are available from the panel. They are not available by voice, and that is deliberate: the phrase router matches whole phrases and extracts nothing from them, which is what stops it guessing at a date and confidently writing up the wrong fortnight.

It costs money, and says so first

Prose over a long session is the largest single request d47 will ever make. So:

• It never happens by itself. There is no schedule, no trigger, no callout that starts one.
• It quotes you first. Working out the cost reads your journals on this machine and sends nothing.
• It reports what it actually cost afterwards, through the same spend ledger as everything else, so what has this cost this month includes it.

Asking is two steps, and they are separate on purpose:

you: write my commander’s log

D47: A log of the last session: 34 things I can account for, out of 4,812 events in 2 journal file(s). Writing it would cost about $0.04 — about 2,100 tokens in and up to 1,800 tokens of prose back, through claude-opus-5. Say “write the log” and I will.

you: write the log

A Commander who set a monthly cap and found it eaten by an unrequested essay about their Tuesday would be right to be angry. Nothing here can do that.

How long a log runs is a setting — brief, standard or full — because the output budget is most of what that figure is pricing.

Writing one

Open Commander’s log in the panel, or say:

write my commander’s log

Files land in data/commander-log/ as markdown, named for the day and the span. A run never overwrites one: the first may already have been edited, and this is the one file in data/ that d47 does not consider its own.

Tools

Every tool here is protected — the panel, a hotkey and the phrase router reach them, and the language model does not. Phase 32 kept its tools away from the model because the model is the component that reads untrusted text. The same reasoning carries one step further here: the model is also not the component that gets to authorise the largest request d47 makes.

estimate_log

Reads the window, prices it, and gets ready. Spends nothing.

{"type":"object","properties":{"range":{"type":"string","description":"What span to cover. Omit for whatever the settings say.","enum":["session","today","week","month"]}},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}

write_log

Writes the log that was just quoted. Refuses unless a quote has been given, and consumes the quote whether it succeeds or not — a second attempt is a second spend, and gets a second figure.

{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}

list_logs

What has been written, and where.

{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}