the catalogue was the only way a remote plugin could arrive, so "build one and give it to a friend" had no route. the first real case is a plugin that must never be listed: fofos/fofos-admin is one website's admin panel, useful to exactly one person. MUCH smaller than the todo assumed. fetchPlugin already cloned, validated the URL, refused to overwrite an existing directory, checked for a manifest and removed a failed clone. exactly one line tied it to the marketplace — where the string came from. so this is a source parameter threaded through, and a route. THE NAME COMES FROM THE REPOSITORY, because appName is the DIRECTORY name and is never declared in a manifest — the id cannot disagree with where the code sits. that decision is inherited here rather than remade: the repo name becomes the directory, the route segment, the table prefix and the sidecar suffix. so it is checked against ^[a-z0-9]+(-[a-z0-9]+)*$ BEFORE anything is cloned; a half-clone under an unusable name reads as a broken plugin rather than an absent one. the URL is validated identically whether it came from the catalogue or from a person, because the catalogue is not a trust boundary — it is just where a string came from, and the same string reaches the same argv. what differs is who may ask: this route is owner-only, and the owner is choosing what code runs rather than choosing from a list somebody curated. validation is not review, and nothing here reads what it cloned. caught by testing: the source reached installPlugin and stopped there — the fetchPlugin call still had the old two arguments, so a URL install fell back to the catalogue and failed with "no catalogue entry". the guard tests are what surfaced it, because the error named the wrong cause. verified end to end against fofos-admin — cloned, schema applied, mounted, dock pinned — then purged, since officer-dev is not that website's machine. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
todo/ — the format
One item per file. A file is a card. That is the whole idea, and everything below follows from it.
It replaced a single 1,050-line TODO.md on 2026-08-21, which had reached 72 open items across 28
sections and was read mostly on a phone. The split was mechanical — no prose was rewritten.
Layout
todo/
├── README.md # this file
├── <theme>/
│ ├── _index.md # the theme itself: display name, and any prose that belongs to the whole group
│ └── <item>.md # one item
The theme is the directory. _index.md carries the theme's display heading, so a theme is
self-describing and nothing has to hold a slug→name map. TODO.md at the repository root is the
generated index over all of it — bun run todo:index.
An item
---
id: fleet/an-orchestrator-that-acts-on-every-server-at
title: 'An orchestrator that acts on every server at once'
theme: fleet
status: open
created: 2026-08-21
date_source: stated
order: 1
---
**An orchestrator that acts on every server at once** — pull and update every platform, restart a
process everywhere, report which host is behind…
id—<theme>/<slug>, and it is the filename. Stable: rename the title freely, leave the id alone. Anything pointing at an item points at this.status—open,doing,blocked,backburnerordone. The board (/todos) renders one column per value; adding one is a new entry inTODO_STATUSES(api/todos/todo-tree.ts), not a new file or directory.backburneris parked-not-dead — still counted as open by the index.created— the date the item was raised.date_sourcesays how much to trust it:stated(the prose named a date — true),section(inherited from its old section heading — close),assumed(unknown, floored at 2026-08-20, the day before the split — a bounded "before today" rather than an invented day).order— position within the theme, preserved from the original list. What a board reorders.priority(optional) —urgentwhen the owner says so, absent otherwise. There is no scale of five: an item is either something he named as urgent or it is not, and a scale would only invite everything to drift upward. Urgent items are listed first in the generated index.due(optional) — a date the owner named. Only ever written because he said one; never inferred from tone or from how the item is worded.- The body is prose, and it is the point. These entries carry the reasoning, what was verified versus assumed, and what was already tried. An item stripped to a title loses the thing that made this list worth keeping.
Two-way sync — the contract for the Kanban board
A board that reads this tree and writes back to it is a wanted feature
(todo/prompt-library/… see todo/tooling/). What it may rely on:
- A card is a file. Creating a card creates a file; moving a card between columns rewrites one frontmatter field; deleting a card deletes a file. Every board action is a small, reviewable git diff.
idis the identity, not the title and not the line number. Renaming or rewording never orphans a card.- Frontmatter is the machine's half, the body is the human's half. A board may rewrite frontmatter freely. It must not reformat a body it did not change — the prose is hand-written and a normalising pass would produce a diff nobody can read.
TODO.mdis generated output. A board must never write to it; it regenerates from the tree.- Git is the sync log. No lock file and no sidecar state: the file on disk is the truth, and two writers are resolved the way every other conflict in this repository is.