In detail#

This page is read while working, not before. It gives the reference in the order a session meets it: the documents, the reading rules, how a session runs, who writes what, and what the checks verify — for a session opened as the manual describes.

Four locations, four tenses#

A workshop’s framing is organised around four locations, and an item lives in exactly one of them. Drift often starts when one document quietly takes on the role of another.

One format is added to those, rather than a tense: _planning/ takes the long form of subjects whose reasoning does not fit on a line, at any stage of their life. Each document there carries its own status in its header.

The map and the reading conditions#

The map has a name: organization.md. It is the only file read in full, in order and unconditionally.

Every condition is declared there twice, and that is deliberate. Once in the map’s index line, to let the decision be taken without opening anything — an opened file is already paid for. Once in the file’s own header, where the condition carries authority. The two failures are not symmetrical: a file nothing declares is read by nobody; an index line no file answers promises what does not exist.

A session, start to finish#

At the start#

The agent reads the map, then opens only what a condition fires: your profile, the atlas and the todo of the workshop named, then what is volatile. Nothing else. The SQL conventions will wait until it writes SQL; the closing protocol will wait for the close.

During#

Ordinary work. What changes comes down to two reflexes imposed on the agent:

• a decision that is yours gets flagged, not guessed. A choice the corpus cannot settle becomes a ❓ item in the todo, and the work carries on around it;
• what is found outside the perimeter is reported without being pursued. A fault found elsewhere is worth a sentence, not an unrequested audit — otherwise the time of your request goes elsewhere.

An extract from a todo, with its grammar:

## [EXPORT] The accounting export

> status: active

- ⬜ **Write the CSV format the firm expects**, columns and order included
- ⚠ **Amounts are in cents throughout the chain.** An export in euros has already
  produced a 0.03 € rounding gap over a financial year
- ❓ **Decimal separator: point or comma.** The firm accepts both; the choice decides
  the import settings and must not be guessed

The four marks — ⬜ to do, ⚠ guard-rail, ❓ open decision, 💡 idea — exist so that an agent flags instead of deciding.

At the close#

An ordered protocol the agent applies without judgement calls: the todo keeps only what is open, what closed leaves for its story in done/ or becomes an atlas line, the handoff says what is volatile, the session names what it renders false before writing to the atlas, the checks run, the commits go out — one per repository touched — then comes the list of what is left to push. The next session therefore starts from something written.

That step is the least obvious of them, and the one that protects the most. Before a line goes into the atlas or the todo, say which of the lines already there become wrong, superseded or redundant. None is a valid answer; silence is not. Adding is a gesture that confronts nothing — which is how a framing accumulates lines that are each correct on their own and contradictory together.

Each of those gestures has its rule. When an item leaves the todo, its destination is not left to the judgement of the moment; the same goes for a guard-rail once the work that produced it closes.

You stay the arbiter#

And the design assumes it. Deciding what is a guard-rail rather than a passing precaution, what is genuinely finished, which decision must not be guessed, or that a remark becomes a rule: those are yours. The agent proposes and drafts; what carries authority stays your decision.

What the checks verify#

The checks — the lint — run at the close. Their report is what you read: that is what keeps the review cheap — a report, not every file. It verifies:

• reading time at the start, measured and reported, which keeps it from drifting unseen;
• the double declaration of conditions, both ways: a file nothing declares, an index line no file answers;
• citations after a reorganisation: when a file splits, no reference may be left behind;
• the backup: it warns you for as long as nothing is pushed off this machine.

Its limit is simple: it bears on the documents, never on your work itself. It verifies that they are consistent with each other; it never verifies that what they state is still true. That half does not delegate.