Identity — what Bee Box is
A system that Claude Code operates over a box: a special place on disk — files with defined inputs, outputs, and services. "A personal assistant and operating system built on Claude Code" (CLAUDE.md) is the identity; the OS half is the ambition — a place you inhabit and build within, not an app you open (ruling 3; the feel is ../architecture/spirit.md's "It should feel like a place"). It's not meant to feel like a work tool, even if it could be used professionally.
Interface: web UI privileged, documents as the record
Both, now (rulings 1, 6, 7):
- The web UI is the main UI, and a real focus — the privileged, richest surface, with a design system, capture pages, SSR, and the interface-as-cards direction built entirely around it. The early framing of the web app as a debugging viewer that would "later split into a cleaner user-facing view" is fully out of date; the split that actually exists is the permission boundary (Admin/OAuth stays shell; everything else is product surface).
- Conversation and chat are important — chat is the central page and a continuous presence (see
interaction-model.md). - The documents are the result and the main method of record. The original "the interface is documents, not a UI" claim was about where truth lives, not where interaction happens: the filesystem is the state; the web UI and chat are how you touch it.
Shared boxes, one sharing granularity each
Boxes are shared (ruling 2). Sometimes one person, but a box can hold multiple people (the household box of ../architecture/01-what-is-this.md is the design target, not a dramatization). A box has exactly one granularity of sharing: everyone in the box shares everything in it. Different groups or subgroups need different boxes. Per-member identity beyond the auth allowlist is not designed yet — aspiration, not description.
Runs on a full computer, never serverless
The box runs locally, or remotely — but a remote deployment is always a full computer (the production fleet: a resident bbx hub routing to per-box bbx serve children). It will never run on AWS Lambda or similar serverless slices (ruling 4). The old "local first, cloud later" section was a sequencing note, not a design position; the hosted posture is first-class now (../implemented-plans/boxes-as-packages-v2.md, including the stranger-can-start-a-box-in-minutes goal).