Operating the bundle

Everything here is relative to .okf/, the bundle root — reference/ below is .okf/reference/ on disk, and a link written /reference/thing.md inside a concept resolves there.

What to load

This file is the whole of the three rules and the routing question, and it is the part every session needs. Two things come before opening any guide: the CLI already answers most questions about state, and the line shapes are below.

Ask the CLI before you read a file

State is computed, not read. Every row below is one call answering what several cats answer, and the first row costs nothing at all — it is already in front of you.

to answer	run	not
what is on the board / what is in flight	(already in the session banner)	cat board.md
the board after you changed it	okf pro state	re-reading the file
one row per board line, with dates and links	okf pro board	counting headings by eye
what awaits the owner's read	okf pro unverified	grepping frontmatter
the day's snapshot line	okf pro snapshot	computing it by hand
every invariant at once	okf pro audit	—

And five writes have exactly one correct form, so they are verbs rather than shapes to reconstruct. Each is additive and targeted: it appends a line or edits the line you named, refuses if the change it computed is not the change it declared, and never rewrites a file.

to do	run
capture something into the Inbox	okf pro capture "the words you heard"
move a line to In flight (refuses over the cap)	okf pro promote <selector>
move one back to Backlog	okf pro demote <selector>
open today's journal day and index it	okf pro journal open
the three mechanical closing moves	okf pro close <project>

A <selector> is a /projects/<slug> link, a bare slug, or a substring only one line carries — never a position. Two lines matching is a refusal, not a coin toss.

Add --json to state, board, snapshot, unverified or friction when you want to compute on the answer rather than read it; okf pro state --full adds the corpus-derived parts behind one parse. audit and records answer with their exit code and take no flags.

The line shapes, so you do not have to open a guide for them. A board line starts - at column zero — a * bullet or an indented dash is invisible to every counter, including the cap. Inbox and Deadlines lines lead with the date: - YYYY-MM-DD — <the words>. A Waiting line carries chase YYYY-MM-DD, literally. A conflict line is an Inbox line reading - YYYY-MM-DD — Resolve: [/a.md] says X, [/b.md] says Y — noticed while <doing what>. The closure marker is the word then the date with only spaces, a colon, a dash, asterisks or an opening parenthesis between: # Title — closed 2026-08-12. That is a deliberate partial duplication of the guides, and the guides remain the full reference — this is here so the commonest question does not cost a file read.

The guides

Each act has its detail one file away. Load the one the task calls for, not all five.

• guides/frontmatter.md — the trust family this profile adds on top of the format: generated:, verified: and the tiers they produce, status:, and the stale_after: windows. Before writing any concept, and whenever provenance is the question.
• guides/board.md — the six sections, the date grammar the counters actually read, and what makes a line invisible to them. Before editing board.md.
• guides/attribution.md — sources:, and the keyed footnotes that tie one claim to one source. Before filing anything into reference/.
• guides/closing.md — the four moves that close a piece of work, and the exact spellings of the closure marker. Before marking a project closed.
• guides/okf-rules.md — the format's floor, which holds for any OKF bundle and not just this profile: the three required frontmatter keys, directory indexes, link form, the log entry. When okf validate or okf lint disagrees with you.

Read this list permissively. A guide that is missing does not suspend the rule it explains — the three rules below are operative on their own, and the gates enforce them whether the file explaining them was read or not. A file in guides/ that this list does not mention still counts: the index is a map, not a permission list, and adding your own guide beside these is expected. Anything here you do not recognise — an extra heading, a <!-- rule: … --> marker, a file kind you have not seen — is left alone rather than treated as an error.

The three zones

Zone	Directory	What lives there
KNOW	reference/	What other people produced — summarised, cited, attributed.
	learnings/	What I concluded, true beyond the work that produced it.
	glossary/	What a word means here, when it means three things elsewhere.
ACT	projects/	Work with a definition of done. Closes.
	areas/	A standard held indefinitely. Never closes.
TIME	board.md	The single page of forward state — the whole commitment surface.
	journal/	The backward record, one entry per day, append-only.
	roadmap.md	The quarterly wavelength. Sparse, links out.

Where a new concept goes

One question routes almost everything: does it outlive the piece of work that produced it?

• No — it is work-scoped → projects/<slug-or-key>/. Meeting notes, the decision that only makes sense inside this project, the finding that is really a status update.
• Someone else wrote it → reference/. Their document, their claim, your summary of it, with the source recorded.
• A conclusion of mine, true beyond one piece of work → learnings/.
• A term needing a fixed meaning → glossary/.
• What happened on a day → journal/.

When two of these fit, the tiebreak is retrieval: file it where you would look for it in six months, having forgotten which project it came from.

When none of them fits, prefer the room that nearly does. Do not open a catch-all: a room meaning "everything else" is a blind spot by construction — things enter it and nothing enumerates them again — and nobody has ever searched for the thing that did not fit.

The five are the starting set, not the closed set. A sixth room is earned by an incident rather than anticipated: once the same misfiling has actually cost you something, make the room, name it for the question it answers rather than for its subject, and link it from index.md — an unlinked directory is a room nobody can find.

Material you are mirroring rather than summarising — a script, run instructions, a vendored copy — already has a home in the format: OKF §6.3's references/. Note the plural: this bundle's reference/ holds your summaries of other people's work, and the two are one character apart.

Before minting any name — a concept's title, a tag, a type — read the naming policy in /areas/corpus.md. It is short, it is the adopter's own standard, and a name that collides with what a word already means in their domain is a file nobody can search for.

Rule 1 — Writing is reconciliation

Before a new concept settles — an inbox line promoted, a briefing created, a finding recorded — search the bundle for what it collides with: okf search on the claim's key terms, and read the bodies of what comes back — not a glance at titles. Three outcomes. It contradicts nothing: file it. It supersedes something: correct the loser now — title and description: first, status: deprecated on its frontmatter, superseded reasoning into <details> — because ingestion is the only moment both claims are in front of someone and the cost of noticing is at its minimum. The status field is the machine-readable half of that move: it is what lets a later search see that a collision was already settled instead of re-litigating it, and the reconcile gate says so when it fires next.

Or the conflict cannot be settled on the spot: file it, do not resolve it — one dated line on the board, both sides linked:

- <date> — Resolve: [/reference/a.md] says X, [/glossary/b.md] says Y — noticed while <doing what>

An unresolved contradiction is work. It competes for attention like work, and only resolving it takes the line away. Know what this rule cannot do: it catches collisions as well as your search vocabulary does, and no better — which is why it has a second checkpoint: whenever any search returns two concepts that disagree, that collision gets the same board line, whatever you were looking for. And it is why index.md curation and glossary/ naming are load-bearing rather than hygiene: the corpus's consistency is bounded by its findability.

Rule 2 — The day ends with a snapshot, and the delta is the signal

The end-of-day sitting (journal entry + board update, one habit) appends one line to log.md, last entry under the day:

* **Snapshot**: inbox N (oldest Xd) · in flight k/CAP · waiting N (M past chase) · backlog N · to read N · unverified briefings N · conflicts open N · deadlines within 7d not in flight N · projects with 0 concepts N

The line is mechanical and belongs to log.md, not the journal — counters are neither hunch nor judgment. Mechanical means derivable: okf pro snapshot . computes the line, and the stop gate refuses one that disagrees with the board it summarises — a counter that drifted is a confession that lies. The deadlines field is a confessed blind spot: a date due within seven days that no in-flight line links is a collision visible before it lands. Its value is the comparison with yesterday's line: "+8 inbox, oldest now 6d" is information; a standing count is wallpaper, and a warning that is always present carries zero information. If a delta deserves a sentence of judgment, that sentence goes in the journal, which is where judgment lives. And a day too heavy to journal gets the mechanical fallback: reconstruct the entry from log.md and git history, and say in the entry that it was reconstructed — a thin honest record beats a gap that reads as a quiet day.

A brand-new bundle ships dateless — an undated log.md, an empty journal/. That is day-zero state, not a defect: never backfill an initialization entry or a day nobody worked. The first working day creates its own ## <date> section and first journal entry, and the stop gate hands you the exact snapshot line to append.

Rule 3 — In flight is a budget

At most 5 demands in flight; board.md carries In flight: k/5 at the top. Promoting from Backlog requires demoting something — or renegotiating the cap, which is allowed, visible, and journal-worthy, because "the week the cap went to 6" is exactly what a review needs and exactly what a silently exceeded cap hides. The cap's job is not to make five the right number; it is to make overload undeniable on the day it happens. Two exemptions: Deadlines (they come due regardless of anyone's budget) and Backlog (captured, not claiming attention). One question the budget asks on its own: an in-flight demand no journal entry has linked in 5 working days gets the dormancy line — still in flight, or backlog pretending? Either answer is fine; holding a slot without moving is not. The session banner asks it mechanically, and stays quiet while the journal is younger than the window — a bundle in its first week cannot be dormant, only new.