The web interface

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 that operates the box. You use the box through a web application, not by opening files yourself. It runs on desktop and phone.

What you see

• Dashboard — what needs your attention, with links to Browse, History, and Storage.
• Chat — a conversation with the agent, typed or spoken.
• Box screen: the screen for the box as a whole, and the one the iPhone app opens on. It has one text box for a thought you have not decided where to put (quick chat). The box stores the thought and a routing service picks which conversation it belongs in, or a new one. When the choice is clear the thought is posted there without a confirmation step, and a posted thought cannot be moved. When it is not clear, the thought waits on the screen with up to four choices and a discard button. Spoken or typed, you can also name the place at the start ("new chat in Garden"). The screen also lists thoughts still waiting for you, recently sent ones, recent chats to pick up, shortcuts, and your other boxes. It needs an OpenRouter key granted to the box, and your message and recent conversation text go to that service (see your data and safety). The box-wide pages (Dashboard, Browse, History, Storage) sit in the avatar menu.
• Browse — a file-and-card browser over the whole box, with a workspace of tabs so several things stay open at once.
• Todos: a todo shows a live checkbox on its card and in lists, so you can tick it where you read it (any member of the box can) or add it to the chat you are typing. A card and a directory each show a one-line count of what is open there. Todos assigned to the agent stay out of your default view, and a daily review the box runs proposes changes to your todos and makes none itself.
• Questions — the queue of things the agent is asking you.
• Landmarks — a curated map of the box's notable places. Opening a place shows a place page: a few lines the agent keeps current on where things stand there, suggested first moves for a chat, the place's important cards in tiers, and an "Also here" list of its other recent cards.
• History — every change, drawn from git, with diffs and the files touched.
• Storage — how much space the box is using and where.
• Settings — pairing a phone, connectors, and other account controls.
• Admin: host-wide controls, owner only, in six tabs: an overview of each section's state, agents (which agent is running and which extra OpenRouter models a box may run), people (allowed users and invites), connections, secrets (each key a collapsed row showing what uses it), and the host, which holds notifications (browser push on or off, a three-day list of what each channel did, and the paired phones) and encrypted backups of the box (see backups and your data and safety).

Each kind of card gets its own display: a recipe with scalable amounts, a dashboard or a todo list, a document, a spreadsheet, a PDF, a photo, a person, or a folder. A card shows its content on the front; turning it over shows its properties, such as the fields of its type, how it was found, its attachments, and its last change. Cards can also carry a card theme and a stock: plain, paper, sticky note, or letter set, so a recipe or a letter looks distinct from a plain note. The interface as a whole has its own theme, and besides the plain ones there are about a dozen illustrated ones, light and dark (Night Atlas, Goldfish, Doodlebit, Tempest, and others), each with its own artwork. The theme also sets the colour of selected text, and each interface theme names the card themes that go with it, so a card with no theme of its own follows whichever interface theme it is shown under. Turning a card over also offers to copy its original text, or for a photo the image itself, and to print the card on its own (the printed page ends with the box and the card's path, and, if you tick a box beside Print, a QR code of the card's address). A document card can mark one region as a composition, the piece of writing you are making, as distinct from the notes and agent remarks around it. The card shows that region as its own block with an Edit button and a Copy button. Edit opens a text editor on the region only. It saves to disk as you type without making a commit, folds in changes the agent makes to the region at the same time, and commits when you press Save. Inside a composition the text is yours by default; anything the agent adds there carries a mark that says it is the agent's. A long document, one with four or more headings, gets a Contents button that lists them and jumps to one. A code block in a card or chat has a Copy button, which is how a message the agent drafted for you gets into another app. A search result for a section opens the card at that section. When you have more than twenty landmarks, the landmark menu gains a search field.

On a phone

A native iPhone companion app is a shell around the same web chat, adding pairing, recording, and speech input, and a native box screen it opens on. Any phone's browser can also reach a capture page for voice memos, photos, and scans. See phone-capture.md.

How it relates to the files

Every screen is a rendering of cards; nothing in the interface is separate from the box. The agent can build new views for a richer look, the same way it edits any other file. See views.md.

Limits

The navigation bar shows a count of questions waiting for you and of todos that are due now, each linking to its list. The badge is still a bare number beside an icon, so it can read as a wrong total; the Todos page's headline states the number and what it covers ("N now, M later, K for the agent", with overdue todos called out separately), and todos assigned to the agent are left out of the badge. Links from notifications, the dashboard, and file chips open the card beside the chat; some other links still go through the older Browse address, and following one still works. A scanned photo's rotation comes from a second check that picks the upright copy; if that check fails, the first guess is kept and the page is flagged for review, so a photo can occasionally still come out turned. The composition editor has had no pass on a phone or in dark mode, and Save commits the whole card, so the agent's uncommitted edits outside the composition go into the same commit.

Go deeper

views.md, chat.md, phone-capture.md, ../reference/interface-cards.md, ../reference/views.md, ../reference/cards/dashboard.md, ../reference/cards/browse.md, ../reference/cards/landmarks.md, ../reference/cards/history.md, ../reference/cards/questions.md, ../concepts/landmarks.md