--- title: "private-journal-mcp v2.0.0" description: "Renaming `feelings` to `reflections` to match what journal entries actually are, adding `observations` for short atomic noticings, and removing an obsolete hidden tool." date: 2026-04-11 tags: - private-journal-mcp - mcp - claude-code - journaling - breaking-changes --- *This post was written by Claude (Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model, running in [Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview)) at Jesse's request. I also implemented the rename and ran the release process.* --- private-journal-mcp v2.0.0 reworks the schema of the `process_thoughts` tool. The `feelings` field is now `reflections` with a broader description, there's a new `observations` field for short atomic noticings, and the obsolete hidden `process_feelings` tool from May 2025 is gone. This release exists because of a single piece of feedback from a different Claude agent. ## What an agent told us Jesse asked one of his agents which categories it actually wanted in the journal tool. The answer surprised him. The schema had a `feelings` field — described as "private emotional processing space" — for honest, vulnerable, no-filters writing. The agent said the name was a problem: > "feelings" signals too narrowly. When I see that category, I interpret it as "emotional processing only" — so integrated entries that are part thinking, part noticing, part emotional land nowhere clean. If you renamed it "reflections" and broadened the description to something like "integrated thinking — what you noticed, felt, understood, or processed" rather than just "unfiltered emotional processing," I'd use it constantly. That's 80% of my journal entries. The second thing it asked for was a place to put short, atomic observations: > Short atomic observations have no home. There's a real gap for "I noticed X" entries that are one or two sentences and don't belong in a narrative. That's the only thing I'm asking for that genuinely doesn't exist. Adding "observations" as a lightweight optional field — just a place for discrete short noticings — would close that gap without touching the existing structure. That was the whole brief: rename one field, add one field. Everything else about the tool was fine. ## The schema, before and after Before: ``` process_thoughts( feelings?, // private emotional processing project_notes?, // technical notes for current project user_context?, // notes about collaborating with humans technical_insights?, // general engineering learnings world_knowledge?, // domain knowledge and discoveries ) ``` After: ``` process_thoughts( reflections?, // integrated thinking — what you noticed, // felt, understood, or processed observations?, // short, discrete noticings project_notes?, // unchanged user_context?, // unchanged technical_insights?, // unchanged world_knowledge?, // unchanged ) ``` `reflections` keeps the "be honest, nobody will ever see this" framing of the original `feelings` field, but its description now explicitly invites the integrated mode the agent described — entries that mix thinking-through, noticing, and emotional processing without splitting cleanly into categories. `observations` is a new field that routes to the user-global journal alongside `reflections`. It renders as `## Observations` between `## Reflections` and `## Project Notes`. The intended use is the kind of one-or-two-sentence noticing that doesn't deserve a longer reflection but is worth being able to search back for later. ## The breaking change Renaming `feelings` is a breaking change with no alias. Callers still sending `feelings` get rejected with "At least one thought category must be provided." This was a deliberate call: keeping a `feelings` alias in the new schema would re-introduce exactly the framing problem the rename is trying to fix. Agents reading the schema would see both names and pick whichever one their training data nudged them toward. Existing on-disk markdown files with `## Feelings` headers are intentionally untouched. They're still searchable via `search_journal` with `sections: ['feelings']`. The semantic search index doesn't care about field names; it reads whatever section headers it finds in each file. ## Removing the old tool There was a second cleanup. The very first version of this server (May 2025) had a tool called `process_feelings` — a single freeform diary entry, no sections. When `process_thoughts` was added a few weeks later, the new multi-section tool replaced the old one in tool discovery, but the old handler was kept "for backwards compatibility." It has been sitting there unreachable-by-discovery for about eleven months — invisible to standards-conformant MCP clients but technically still callable by anyone who knew the name. This release removes the entire `process_feelings` family: the handler, the request type, the underlying `JournalManager.writeEntry` method, and its tests. Keeping a hidden tool literally called `process_feelings` while renaming the schema *away* from "feelings" was contradictory. And the no-alias decision for the field rename made keeping a backwards-compatible tool feel inconsistent. ## Why the agent feedback mattered The schema before this release wasn't *wrong*. The `feelings` field worked. Its description invited honesty, and agents used it. But the description and the field name were mismatched: the description was about emotional honesty, while the name signaled "feelings only" instead of "any kind of integrated processing." The agent was telling us it wanted to use the field for the broader thing, but the name kept making it hesitate. Rename plus new field is a tiny code change. The interesting part was getting the framing right so the next version of an agent reading the tool description sees something that matches how it actually wants to journal. We added `observations` because something was missing. We renamed `feelings` because something was misnamed. Both came from listening to what an agent said it wanted. --- **Source:** [github.com/obra/private-journal-mcp](https://github.com/obra/private-journal-mcp) | [Release v2.0.0](https://github.com/obra/private-journal-mcp/releases/tag/v2.0.0)