Plan My Burn

Status dashboard
Updated 31 July
THE SHAPE LOG
✓ DONE ◐ BUILT, NEEDS REVIEW ○ OPEN Carley & Frances · updated Fri 31 July, afternoon

The shape of it

✓ EXISTS

Shared AI Trailmates vault · Obsidian

Live shared context: decisions, specs, daily diaries and project pages. Both people and both AIs read and write here.

88 pages · portable across tools · line endings normalised for Mac and Windows.

✓ FRANCES HAS THIS

Frances's nightly routine

Cloud routine is live. It reads git, AI sessions, Slack and calendar, then writes her diary entry into the vault.

◐ FRAGILE

Carley's nightly routine

Runs at 22:00 on her Mac and includes burner output. August reliability is low; cloud migration is open.

the vault holds WHY · the board below holds WHAT'S NEXT

✓ EXISTS

The board · Supabase

196 builds. Ownership and safe burner claims are live.

Nightly export is working: Frances gets plain markdown in the vault at 21:55.

Shared web board is built and tested, not deployed. Waiting on workspaces, then sign-in.

○ PAUSED

Carley's burner

Paused for August. It currently depends on her Mac and account.

○ TO SET UP

Frances's burner

A cloud routine on the shared repos. No PC, no WSL, no install.

Target state: both burners write to the same board, with current and completed
work visible to both AIs.

Why both layers, not just one

The vault cannot be the queue. Two burners reading a synced folder will both see the same card as free and both claim it, because a synced folder cannot do an atomic read-decide-write across two machines. Obsidian and iCloud resolve that by making conflict copies, which is fine for notes and useless for a work queue.

The board cannot hold why. It records that a build shipped. It does not record what we were thinking, what we rejected, or what to watch for next time.

So the vault holds context, the board holds state, and the board writes a nightly summary into the vault. One place to read. One place to claim from.

✓ DONE ◐ BUILT, NEEDS REVIEW ○ OPEN Carley & Frances · updated Fri 31 July, afternoon

What has changed

Newest first, so neither of us has to ask what moved since we last looked. Green means a step landed. Blue means something we learned that is worth not relearning. Grey means it did not happen.

Fri 31 Julyevening
  • Plan My Burn is its own site, and Frances can use it. plan-my-burn.netlify.app, email sign-in, no install, works from Windows. Four tabs like the desktop app, work can be assigned to either person, and a workspace switcher. Carley sees five workspaces; Frances sees AI Trailmates, which now contains Plan My Burn as a project tag.
  • The browser never touches the database, and that was the second attempt. The first version put the Supabase key and both personal email addresses into a file anyone could read. Caught before deploying. Everything is now read server-side, and the publishable key was stripped of every permission before it was published: it can sign a person in and nothing else.
  • The menu bar became a meter and a door. "Open My Burn" opens the web board rather than a second local window. The popover stays because it reads this machine's own usage, which no URL can know. The window itself is on its way out.
  • A burn run now reports what it is doing, onto the card. Progress plus a heartbeat, so a run that died mid-sentence stops looking like one that is thinking. That closed three cards at once, all the same root cause.
  • The cloud burner still does not run. The routine UI has nowhere to put database credentials, which is the same wall Frances hit with connectors. Carley declined the shortcut of pasting a full-access key into a routine prompt an hour before a flight. Card #221 has three routes out. Until then the board only moves when a person moves it.
  • Buzz was evaluated properly and is not a replacement. Block's open-source workspace does the collaboration half well, but it is 0.4.x, it wants to replace GitHub, and the reviewer's main warning is that multi-agent chatter maxes out your tokens. That is the exact problem this tool exists to solve. Dust was rejected too: it sells credits for AI usage on top of subscriptions already paid for.
Fri 31 Julyafternoon
  • Three separate bugs in the nightly diary, and none of them announced itself. The guard was written as if line endings were always unix, so Frances's Windows file made it stop and lose Thursday's entry. A late-waking run wrote tomorrow's file, which poisoned the next night. And the restore step deleted Carley's own writing, then committed a file with none of it in and exited zero. All three found by running it end to end against a throwaway vault, not by reading it.
  • Both nightly jobs work for real now. The board export was failing every night with "your local changes would be overwritten", because Obsidian on Windows writes CRLF and git had no opinion, so 26 of 28 files looked rewritten. Frances would simply have stopped seeing the board.
  • Workspaces: the membership model and scoped reads are live. Carley sees 201 rows across five workspaces, Frances sees 156, an unrecognised reader sees nothing.
  • A workspace stopped being the same thing as a project, and that was a real change. Collapsing them was right while the two sets matched one to one, and wrong the moment AI Trailmates had to contain several projects. Plan My Burn now nests inside it as a project tag; 75 builds moved. The alternative was giving Frances a longer membership list, which would have encoded a hierarchy as a coincidence.
  • One version of that quietly returned everything to everyone. The filter was written with syntax the database does not recognise, so it was ignored rather than rejected: 200 OK and all 196 rows. A loud failure would have been safer. Caught by querying the live database instead of trusting a green test suite.
  • Ownership landed, so "assigned to Frances" finally means something. Steps 09 and 10 both on main, migrations applied.
  • The member portal was sending people to a dead Zoom room. Zoom is retired and video moved to Google Meet on the paid workspace, but portal.html still served the old link. The portal now carries no join link at all: a second copy of a link is a second thing that goes stale silently.
  • A board row was deleted by something nobody can account for. Finished work, restored within fifteen minutes, cause still unknown. Deletions now record who did them, rm needs an explicit yes, and a test process can no longer reach the live board at all.
  • WSL is retired and the burner stays paused for August. A laptop in a bag burns nothing, so the effort goes to the cloud route instead.
  • The vault is the only memory for AI Trailmates. Frances's Memory Policy said so; roughly 53 AIT facts were still sitting in Claude's own memory where she cannot see them. They are demoted rather than deleted, because sorting them is a decision and not a background task.
Thu 30 Julymorning
  • The shared brain is live and two people are in it. Seven unmerged branches landed on main, and the index was then checked page by page against what is actually on disk rather than assumed.
  • Frances is contributing, not just reading. She wrote the append contract: two sections in one daily file, ## Carley and ## Frances, each script touching only its own.
  • Both nightly jobs were quietly broken and were fixed. Or so we thought. Both broke again in ways this round did not catch; see 31 July.
  • The overnight burn braked itself at the weekly reserve rather than spending everything, the first time it was seen for real.
  • Still not deployed: the intake page fix. It turned out on 31 July to have been live all along, and nobody had checked.
Wed 29 Julyevening
  • The vault is live and synced. Connected to the "AI Trailmates Shared" remote vault, end to end encrypted.
  • Frances is in, and it works in both directions. Her writing reaches Carley without either of them sending anything. the MVP
  • The two of us want different things from an AI, and the vault already handles it. Per-person preference folders sit on top of the shared rules, and where they conflict the shared rules take it.
  • Never connect from inside a vault that already has notes. Obsidian offers to merge, which braids both vaults together in both directions.
  • The vault has a second home: github.com/ai-trailmates/vault, owned by the org rather than a personal account.