A project's working memory
A renovation, a class, a move, a piece of research. Its context is spread across chats, a notes app, a camera roll, and some email, and each time you come back you rebuild it before you can do anything. A box is one directory of your data, a card is one markdown file in it, and the agent is the coding agent that works inside that project directory when you are in it.
What you do. Tell the box this is an area you work in. Put things there: photos, notes, quotes, documents, forwarded mail. State the rules that hold locally, in words: what goes here, who the people are, what you already decided. Ask what is outstanding.
What the box does. The directory gets a landmark card, marking it as a spot you can jump to and as a destination triage may file into. A briefing card holds what every agent working there needs to know: the key people (each linked to their person card), the subjects involved, and the questions offered on an empty chat. A todo-view card is a live, self-updating list gathering every todo written anywhere beneath the directory, plus todos elsewhere that link into it, grouped by the card and heading each was written under, with a checkbox to tick each off where it sits, so the list of what is due is assembled rather than maintained. Prose becomes doc cards. A chat opened at the landmark starts knowing what the area is about, and the agent can still look anywhere else in the box.
What it needs. Nothing beyond the box itself. Landmarks, chat, triage, making it yours, what it requires.
Where it is still rough. A directory with no landmark is invisible to the landmarks page and to triage, so an area you never marked is not an area yet, and a first-time user read "landmark" as meaning physical places. The box will not notice on its own that a project has gone quiet: it keeps track, reminds you, and runs what you asked for, and it does not anticipate. Where a todo sits is what it means, so one written under the wrong heading is grouped with the wrong thing. The navigation shows a count of waiting questions and of todos due now, but the badge is a bare number beside an icon and can read as a wrong total, though the Todos page's headline states what it counts.
What makes it possible
- Landmarks (landmarks): the editorial layer over a flat tree, saying which few spots are the main pathways; the same card makes the directory a filing destination.
- Briefings (briefing): the primary place for what every agent working here needs to know, so a chat opened there starts informed.
- Views (views): a display built for a kind of card, which is what makes the todo list assembled rather than maintained.
- Triage (triage): once the directory is a destination, new material files itself there instead of waiting in an inbox.
- Integrity (it keeps itself coherent): links between cards are checked and rewritten when a card moves, so a collection that grows for years stays navigable rather than accumulating dead references.