olai

{"id":"kitchen","ord":"a","title":"Kitchen renovation"}
{"id":"demo","parent":"kitchen","ord":"a0",
 "title":"Demolition","done":"2026-08-09T14:02:11-04:00"}
{"id":"order","parent":"kitchen","ord":"a1",
 "title":"Order the new cabinets #blocking",
 "doing":true,"date":"2026-08-07","after":["demo"],
 "doc":"cabinets.md",
 "desc":"Measure twice — the corner unit is the risky one."}

The outline above, as stored on disk.

$ git diff
-{"id":"order","parent":"kitchen","ord":"a1", … }
+{"id":"order","parent":"now","ord":"a1", … }

Moving a subtree changes the parent field. Children reference order by id and are unaffected.

# Cabinet specs

The corner unit is the **risky one** — see
[the measurements](measurements.md).

- 600 mm base × 4
- corner carousel × 1

cabinets.md — a plain Markdown file next to the outline, editable with any editor.

Daily/
  2026/
    08/
      2026-08-12.md   ← the 12th
      2026-08-10-recap.md  ← not a daily note

Convention, not configuration: the basename has to be the date and nothing else.

Two keys write all three. ⌘+Enter finishes something, and takes that back: done is the mark with an instant on it, which is what puts the work on that day’s page. ⌘+⇧+Enter walks the mark on, one step round the answers a person gives about work they have not finished. The last stop is an answer rather than a gap — a node carrying no mark is not an unfinished one, and walking to it is how you say a row was never a task.

Finishing something is a thing you mean, not a thing to do on the way past, so nothing stamps a completion while you are walking round — and the walk will not take finished work backwards. Press it on a finished row and the write is refused, in the same words an agent gets: nothing should decide on your behalf that finished work is not finished. ⌘Enter takes the done off, and the walk carries on from there.

overdue(n) ⇔ n carries todo or doing
             ∧ day(n.date) < today

Derived when the page is drawn, stored nowhere, and spelled once — the agenda's first section and the tone of every date badge are the same predicate. day() is the first ten characters and the comparison is plain string order: dates are text.

Overdue is a definition, not a flag. Nobody sets it and nothing stores it. done extinguishes it by construction — finished work is late at nothing — and a date with no mark is an occurrence: a delivery, a birthday, a ferry. It draws no checkbox, its pill never takes the attention tone, and when its day passes it simply leaves. A day going by is not a failure of a bullet.

Three sections, because they are three pieces of news. Overdue is every slipped task in the directory, oldest first, grouped by the outline it lives in — the one answer no day page can give, because a slipped task is on a day nobody visits. Today is what today's day page holds, minus what is finished. Upcoming is the next seven days that have anything on them, each heading a link to that day's own page; days with nothing do not appear.

A task nobody dated is absent entirely: it has no when to be late against, and inventing one is what this format refuses to do. An empty agenda says Nothing is due. and offers nothing to press — every row on it lives somewhere else, and that is where it is changed.

A date is set on the row. Press the date beside a title and the picker opens in place under it; a row with no date has no pill to press, so its way in is the ••• menu — Set date…, or Change date… on a row that has one. What is written is the ten characters you picked, never a timestamp this app invented on the way, because the control is the browser’s own <input type="date"> and a date is text.

Empty the box and the button becomes Clear date — the ••• menu's own verb, and the same write.

Seven of the fifteen are dark grounds. There is no system chip and no auto: the operating system’s preference is not consulted at all, because two ways to be dark are two answers that can disagree — with each other, and with the reader who already said what they wanted. A page nobody has picked on reads in chalk, which is the default and the one palette that promises WCAG AA on every pair it paints; a unit test holds it to that, pair by pair.

Done: Visible or Hidden is a default, not a second switch. A reading belongs to a page — folds start fresh when you zoom — but “I do not want to look at finished work” is a claim about the reader, and pressing it on every page opened is what a preference exists to stop. So it moves the page you are on and leaves alone any page whose own Done switch you have already pressed. Hiding finished work is a row not drawn: never a node marked, never a file written.

┌─ Changes ─────────────────────────────────┐
│ olai: Outlines as a collection done       │
│   · chat agent · 12m ago · 1a2b3c4        │
│                                           │
│ OUTLINES ─────────────────────────────    │
│ ☑ roadmap.jsonl                           │
│   ✓  Outlines as a collection    done     │
│   ✎  Notes: one state, same line  note    │
│   +  Kolu integration: auto-…    created  │
│                                           │
│ OTHER FILES ──────────────────────────    │
│ ☑ README.md                    modified   │
│ ☐ notes/scratch.md            untracked   │
│                                           │
│ 2 commits not on origin/master   [ Push ] │
│         [ Commit 3 changes · 1 file ]     │
└───────────────────────────────────────────┘

$ claude mcp add olai -- olai mcp ~/outlines

The same tools are available over MCP for agents running in a terminal. There is no write CLI.