Documents

Documents is where you read and edit the files your system runs on — the reports agents write, the plans you review, the reference material you bring in. It is a two-panel surface: a file tree with search on the left, a Markdown editor on the right. The tree shows your documents/ folder by default, and everything you see is the plain file on disk — the same file your agents read and write. For the model behind the tree, read your workspace and documents.

The tree

• Default root is documents/. The gear in the panel header lets you point the tree at any folder under the workspace root instead (. shows the whole workspace); Reset returns it to documents/. This is a browse preference — it changes what the tree displays, not where anything is stored.
• Create from the header. New file and New folder create inline at the selected location; a new file opens straight into Edit mode.
• Select several at once. Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on macOS) toggles a file in or out of the selection, Shift-click extends the range, Ctrl/Cmd-A selects everything visible — and every action below applies to the whole selection, folders included.
• Reorganize directly. Files move by drag and drop — within the tree, between Command Center windows, and to or from your OS file manager, since drag and drop is native. Dragging a file in from outside imports a copy, and a name clash asks before overwriting rather than after.
• Right-click for the rest. The context menu carries Move to… (a folder picker, for when dragging across a long tree is awkward), Duplicate (a collision-safe copy in place), delete to the OS trash, and rename.
• Reflag in bulk. The tree's Reflag control changes the lifecycle flag of selected files in one action (flag changes are renames — see below).
• The compound lifecycle actions. The same menu offers Move to live/, Move to planning/ and Move to archive/, and two of the three do more than they say. live/ and archive/ relocate the files and rewrite their flag suffix in one action, so a document arrives in its new folder already carrying the right state; planning/ moves and leaves the flag alone, because a plan's own state is not implied by where it sits. Each item says which it is on hover.

Search

The corpus is large; the search panel above the tree is how you actually find things.

• Name / Content modes. Name matches file names; Content searches inside files, and opening a content hit jumps the editor to the exact line.
• Recents — two scopes: files recently modified on disk (which surfaces agent writes) and files you recently opened here.
• By flag — filter the corpus by lifecycle flag to see, for example, everything still wip.

The editor

A file opens in Read mode — rendered Markdown. The toolbar across the top gives you, left to right:

• Read ⇄ Edit toggle. Edit is the raw-Markdown editor; the Save button writes your changes to disk and lights up as soon as you have unsaved edits.
• Lifecycle flag control. Shows the file's current flag and lets you change it. Changing a flag renames the file per the naming convention (…_wip.md → …_live.md), which is how document state travels with the document. Disabled while you have unsaved edits. The info hint next to it restates the convention.
• Frontmatter panel. Show and edit the file's YAML frontmatter as fields (a badge shows how many fields the file carries).
• Outline rail. The document's headings; click one to jump to it in the rendered view.
• Knowledge-graph status panel. Whether this file is indexed in the knowledge graph, which workspaces it belongs to, and the actions to ingest or enrich it — plus Show in Cortex, which jumps to this document's node in the graph. See the knowledge graph.
• Copy path and Close.

Below the toolbar the editor tracks a word count and estimated reading time.

Working alongside agents

Agents write into the same tree while you have it open, and the view is built for that:

• The stale bar. If the file you have open changes on disk, a bar appears immediately offering to reload the disk version — or, if you have edits you want to keep, to overwrite the disk version with your in-editor content. Nothing is silently clobbered in either direction.
• The dirty guard. Navigating away with unsaved edits prompts first, in this view and across the whole app.
• Deep links land here. Clicking a file in the Activity Log, a document node in Cortex, or a hit in the Cmd/Ctrl-K palette opens the file here and reveals it in the tree.

One folder in the tree also reorganizes itself. Harvested news lives under documents/news_harvest/, and that subtree is under a retention clock: items past the window move into an archive/ folder beside them rather than being deleted, so browsing it a month apart will not show the same layout. Nothing else in the tree is aged automatically, and the controls for that one are in Observer ▸ Settings ▸ Retention.

Related pages

• Your workspace & documents — the tree, the conventions, and why files are the source of truth
• The knowledge graph — what "indexed" means and what ingesting does
• Activity Log — watching agent writes as they land
• Keyboard shortcuts