Where a fact came from, in whose words

A box is a directory of your data, kept under version control with a full history of changes (using git); a card is a markdown file with a structured header; the agent is the coding agent (Claude Code or Codex) that operates the box. Information in the box is meant to carry where it came from, and to keep your own words rather than the agent's summary of them, so you can tell what you said from what the agent inferred.

What it does for you

• A thing you said is kept as an exact quote, not a rewrite, and can carry who said it.
• A fact pulled from an email, a page, or another card points back to where the agent read it.
• A remark you leave on a document anchors to the exact passage it is about, even if the document later changes.
• A rule you teach the agent is recorded in your own wording, not its restatement.
• Every change to the box is committed to its history, traceable to who or what made it.

How it works, briefly

Two markings do most of this in a card's body. One marks a block of text as someone's exact words and, when known, whose; the agent must use it whenever it records something you said, rather than paraphrasing. The other marks where content came from (another card, an external file, or a web address) and can note the exact passage and how it was used ("verbatim", "a summary of the third paragraph"). A remark on a saved page or external file uses this same marking to point at the span it is about. Separately, every commit to the box records which connector or agent made the change. For the curious, the markup is {% quote %} and {% source %}.

Limits

The box's design documentation calls full provenance an aspiration, not a finished feature: the system does not yet trace every fact back to the message or document that produced it, especially something said in chat. These two markings are real but partial, not a guarantee applied everywhere. Naming the speaker on a quote is an agent convention rather than something the system enforces; in practice the agent does it routinely.

These two marks sit beside a third, the todo, as the baseline every card shares; see enriched markdown.

Go deeper

../design/durability-and-provenance.md, ../concepts/cards.md, ../reference/cards/commentary.md, ../reference/cards/memo.md, web-clipping.md, voice.md