setting up a phone should be one link inside officer — open Calendar, the screen already knows this phone is not set up, click, done. the endpoint for it exists (POST /api/caldav/provision/ios) and nothing in the UI calls it, so the smooth path is built and hidden while the path a new person walks has four fields. it also does not currently work: the profile is refused by iOS 26.6 as "Invalid Profile". the todo records what was RULED OUT with evidence rather than reasoning, because that is the expensive part to redo — delivery works, the phone really received it (the claim is logged now), the server side is correct, and removing PayloadScope did not fix it. signing is untested and is the first experiment. second: a plugin with a sidecar proxy loses the request body on its own routes. createSidecarProxy registers the whole mount prefix and bodyParser skips it, which is right for forwarded traffic and load-bearing for uploads — but it covers the plugin's own routes too. caldav works around it locally; the real fix is the proxy claiming only the sub-path it serves, which is shared machinery and not a thing to change with a phone waiting.
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.