# Project cadence — BIT observes, Lyra picks - **Date:** 2026-09-02 - **Status:** Spec — approved to build - **Branch:** `feat/project-cadence` - **Two repos, both worked on:** `~/break-it-down` (BIT) — Part A; `project-lyra` — Part B - **Related:** `lyra/thoughts.py` (surfacing machinery), `docs/ROADMAP.md` --- ## The problem Brian's long-horizon projects — the garage, the music backup, the side repos — have no due date and no end state. The failure isn't laziness or tracking; it's **initiation**, driven by a specific loop: > "If I can't do it perfectly, why do it at all." → "I'll start tomorrow." → nothing. Three things feed that loop, and all three are fixable. ### 1. The record is false, in the direction of despair BIT records every project as last-updated **2026-03-21**. Meanwhile `project-lyra` alone has **177 commits across 30 distinct working days** since that date, most recently two days ago. BIT isn't recording a dead project. It's blind to a very alive one. This matters more than any feature. A manual tracker doesn't decay to *neutral* when you stop feeding it — it decays to **actively demoralizing**, because absence of records is indistinguishable from absence of work. Open BIT today and it shows a graveyard with March on the headstone. That is "why bother" fuel, manufactured by the tool built to fight it. ### 2. Nothing initiates BIT is a passive store. Using it requires remembering to go to it — which is the same broken step as remembering to start a pomodoro timer. (Note: a pomodoro timer *was* built, in February, and has sat on an undeployed branch since. The timer was never the missing piece.) ### 3. `/actionable` enumerates but does not pick BIT already has a "⚡ Now — what can I do right now?" view. Today it returns **68 tasks**. That is another wall — the exact wall it was built to knock down. Picking requires context BIT structurally cannot have: what time it is, how long Brian has, what he was warm on yesterday, what's gone stale, whether he's at the desk or on his phone. --- ## The frame Mirrors the frame already committed to for the pokerlog: > **BIT is the system of record. Lyra is a client of it, not its container.** **The test that decides where any piece of work goes:** > **Does it produce or derive facts? → BIT. Does it require knowing Brian? → Lyra.** | | Owns | Rationale | |---|---|---| | **BIT** | Facts and everything derived from them: projects, tasks, blockers, estimates, **time logs**, **the git observer**, **cadence health** | Standalone value. Human-editable UI. Works with Lyra dead — and the observer is what keeps that true. | | **Lyra** | The relationship: **the pick**, nudge state, backoff, conversational logging, decomposition offers | Every one of these needs to know it's 9pm, that he has 20 minutes, that he was warm on seismo-relay yesterday. | An earlier draft of this spec put the git observer and cadence math in Lyra. That was wrong and violated the frame above: **the observer produces facts and knows nothing about Brian.** Worse, it would have made BIT's data true only while Lyra was running — reintroducing exactly the coupling the separable frame exists to prevent. Auto-logging and cadence health also make BIT meaningfully better as a standalone product, which is the justification for keeping it separable at all. Same distinction as poker's *ledger* (facts) vs *relationship* (her memory of the sessions). **One sentence:** BIT knows what's possible. Lyra picks one, and knows why. --- ## Design principles 1. **Sessions, not completion.** The unit of progress is a logged session, never a completion percentage. A % bar on an endless project reads 12% forever and is a "why bother" generator. BIT's own v0.2.0 roadmap lists "Progress tracking (% complete)" — **keep it off long-horizon projects.** 2. **Cadence health, not deadlines.** A project is `on_cadence`, `drifting`, or `dormant`. **Dormant is a legal, non-shameful state**, not a failure. 3. **Observe, don't ask.** The record must become true without Brian maintaining it. This is the highest-value thing in the whole design. 4. **No model call in the read/write path.** Reading projects, logging a session, marking dormant — pure HTTP and SQL, working with the MI50 down and every API key expired. The LLM appears **only** in the nudging and picking paths, which are allowed to be flaky because a missed nudge costs nothing. 5. **Push has a budget; ignoring changes state.** Habituation is automatic and cannot be willpowered. The anti-stacking mechanism is scarcity, not notification priority flags. Two ignored nudges puts a project to sleep and she stops asking. 6. **Additive-only to BIT's schema.** (Moot with a fresh DB, but keep the discipline: SQLAlchemy `create_all()` adds missing tables safely; altering existing ones is where data dies.) --- ## What already exists — do not rebuild Substantially more than expected. Verified against the running instance at `10.0.0.40:3002` and the cloned repo at `~/break-it-down`. ### On BIT `origin/dev` (commit `2ee75f7`, Feb 2026) — built, never deployed ```python class TimeLog(Base): __tablename__ = "time_logs" task_id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey("tasks.id"), nullable=False) minutes = Column(Integer, nullable=False) note = Column(Text, nullable=True) session_type = Column(String(50), default="manual") # 'pomodoro' | 'manual' logged_at = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.utcnow) ``` - `Project.weekly_hours_goal` and `Project.total_hours_goal` — cadence targets, already modeled. **Trap: both are named `*_hours_goal` but the source comment says they store MINUTES.** Do not multiply by 60. - `POST /api/tasks/{id}/time-logs`, `GET /api/tasks/{id}/time-logs` - `GET /api/projects/{id}/time-summary` — the accumulation-evidence endpoint - `migrate_add_time_logs.py`, `migrate_add_project_goals.py` — idempotent `CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS` migrations, hand-written - `PomodoroWidget.jsx`, `PomodoroContext.jsx` — a working timer UI `session_type` is a free-text `String(50)`, so adding `'git'` is **not** a schema change. ### On BIT `origin/blockers` (commit `5da6e07`, Mar 2026) — this is what's deployed - `task_blockers` many-to-many association table; `Task.blockers` / `Task.blocking` - `GET|POST|DELETE /api/tasks/{id}/blockers[/{id}]` - `GET /api/actionable` — unblocked, not-done leaf tasks across all projects - `is_archived` on Project, Active/Archived/All tabs ### Branch divergence Three commits total: **2 on dev** (pomodoro + a chore), **1 on blockers**. Neither branch has both halves. `main` (Feb 17) has neither. ### Already in Lyra - `lyra/thoughts.py` — a threaded, decaying, self-surfacing, backs-off-when-ignored nag engine with quiet hours and a push channel. `new_thread:210`, `decay:265`, `record_response:292`, `maybe_surface:326`, `maybe_ping:377`, `maybe_daily_digest:429`. - `lyra/notify.py` — ntfy push with tap-through - `lyra/clock.py:56` — `humanize_gap` ("3 days") - `lyra/tools.py` — tool spec + dispatch pattern - `lyra/mind.py:168` — `build_messages`, where context notes get injected - `lyra/web/` on `:7078` — RTO black/orange theme, matching BIT's existing look ### API facts verified against the running instance - API is served at **`:3002/api/*` through nginx**. Port 8002 is not exposed. - `GET /api/projects/{id}/tree` **404s** on the deployed branch. Use `GET /api/projects/{id}/tasks`. - The README is stale in both directions: it claims v0.1.6 while the deploy reports v0.1.5, it documents `/tree` which doesn't exist, and it omits blockers, `/actionable`, and `is_archived` — listing blockers as "v0.2.0 planned" when they're live. **Treat the code as truth, never the README.** --- ## Architecture ``` ┌────────────────────────┐ │ git repos on host │ │ (7 of 8 BIT projects) │ └───────────┬────────────┘ │ git_observer.py — BIT's code, runs on the HOST │ walk history, group by local day, no LLM ▼ POST /api/tasks/{id}/time-logs ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ BIT — facts, and everything derived from them │ │ projects · tasks · blockers · estimates │ │ time_logs · goals · git_sessions │ │ GET /api/actionable │ │ GET /api/projects/health (cadence, new) │ │ cadence health rendered on the project cards │ └────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘ │ HTTP ▼ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ lyra/bit.py — thin client. No cadence math here. │ └────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┘ ┌───────────┴───────────┐ ▼ ▼ lyra/tools.py lyra/projects.py log_work, pick_next, nudge state, ignore counts, break_down, status backoff, quiet hours ▲ │ │ ▼ chat: "spent an hour thoughts.py surfacing in the garage" (salience → surface → ping → response) ``` **Data flow, one line:** git and chat write facts into BIT; BIT derives cadence; Lyra reads BIT and decides whether, when, and how to open her mouth. --- # Part A — work in `~/break-it-down` (BIT) Everything here is deterministic. **No LLM appears anywhere in Part A.** All of it makes BIT better as a standalone product, independently of Lyra. ## A0 — consolidation and deploy There is no production data. The 8 projects / 77 tasks on `10.0.0.40` were test builds; a snapshot lives at `~/bit-seed-snapshot/` if any of it is worth reseeding through the existing JSON import. 1. Merge `origin/dev` and `origin/blockers` into a single branch. Three commits; the backend touch points barely overlap (`models.py` gains `TimeLog` from one and `task_blockers` from the other). 2. Deploy BIT **on this machine** via its existing `docker-compose.yml`. Pick ports that don't collide with `lyra-web` (`:7078`) or `lyra-ntfy`. 3. Fresh `bit.db` — `create_all()` builds the full schema. The migration scripts become unnecessary but stay in the repo for the old instance. 4. Verify post-merge: `/api/actionable`, `/api/tasks/{id}/time-logs`, `/api/projects/{id}/time-summary`, and the Pomodoro widget all respond. 5. Create the real projects. `Clean up march 26` becomes actual physical projects (garage, music backup, spare closet). **Exit criteria:** one BIT instance on this box serving blockers *and* time logs. ## A1 — the git observer Ships **with BIT**, in BIT's repo. Deterministic Python, no model, no knowledge of Brian — it produces facts, which is why it lives here. **Deployment note:** BIT stays in Docker. The observer ships in BIT's repo but runs **on the host** (systemd timer preferred over cron — better logging and `systemctl status`), POSTing to BIT's API like any other client. This is not a workaround for Docker; it is correct regardless: 1. **It's a batch job, not a request handler.** It runs on a schedule and exits. That doesn't belong in a web container's lifecycle either way. 2. **Volume-mounting repos would rot.** Every new project would require editing `docker-compose.yml` — exactly the kind of manual upkeep step that goes stale, which is the failure mode this whole project exists to fix. A path in a config table costs nothing. 3. **HTTP decouples it usefully.** The observer can later run on a different machine entirely (the Windows box, for repos that live there) with no code changes. Putting it inside the container throws that away. Requires `git` and Python on the host, both already present. ### Config A repo↔project mapping: local repo path → BIT project id. Stored in BIT (a small `observed_repos` table with a settings UI later, or config file for v1). Explicit, never auto-discovered — auto-discovery would guess wrong and pollute the ledger. ### Session derivation For each repo, group commits **by local calendar day** in Brian's timezone, not UTC — an 11pm commit belongs to that evening. For each day with commits: - `minutes = (last_commit_ts - first_commit_ts) + LEAD_PADDING` - `LEAD_PADDING = 10` — work precedes the first commit - `MIN_MINUTES = 15` — a single-commit day would otherwise be 0 - `MAX_MINUTES = 240` — a 9am and an 11pm commit is not a 14-hour session These are heuristics. They must be **config, not constants**, and documented as estimates in both the spec and the code. - `session_type = "git"` — never `manual` or `pomodoro`. Estimated time must never masquerade as measured time. The field is a free-text `String(50)`, so this is **not a schema change**. - `note` = commit count and short SHA range, for traceability. ### Attribution `time_logs.task_id` is `NOT NULL`, but a commit maps to a *repo* (project), not a task. Two deterministic tiers: 1. **Conventional-commit scope match.** `feat(persona): …` → match `persona` against task titles and tags in that project, case-insensitive substring. Plain string matching, no model. 2. **Fallback:** a per-project `Unfiled work` task, created on demand. Attribution is a nice-to-have; **the totals are the point**. It must never block or fail a backfill. LLM-assisted attribution is explicitly deferred (see Non-goals). ### Idempotency — the critical correctness property The observer runs repeatedly and must never double-log. A `git_sessions` table in BIT: `(repo_path, local_date)` unique → `time_log_id`, `last_sha`. A day is logged only if that key is absent. Idempotent by construction. A re-run over a day that gained new commits **updates** the existing time log rather than adding a second one. ### Backfill One-shot run over history since 2026-03-21 (or repo start). `project-lyra` alone should produce ~30 sessions. **This is the emotional payload of the entire project** — the first time BIT is opened afterwards it says "30 days worked since March" instead of showing a tombstone. **Exit criteria:** BIT shows true history for every configured repo; re-running the observer changes nothing. ## A2 — cadence health Derived from `time_logs` + `Project.weekly_hours_goal`, both of which are BIT's. No knowledge of Brian required, so it belongs here rather than in Lyra. ### States - `on_cadence` — trailing-7-day minutes ≥ `weekly_hours_goal` - `drifting` — some activity in the window, below goal - `dormant` — no session in `DORMANT_AFTER_DAYS` (default 30), or set explicitly - `untracked` — no goal set; fall back to days-since-last-session alone `weekly_hours_goal` is nullable, so `untracked` is the common initial state and must render sensibly. **Trap:** `weekly_hours_goal` and `total_hours_goal` are named *hours* but the source comment says they store **minutes**. Do not multiply by 60. ### Surface it - `GET /api/projects/health` — cadence state and accumulated time per project - **Render it on the project cards.** They currently show `Created 3/20/2026` and nothing about activity, which is precisely how the graveyard effect happens. Last-touched plus cadence state plus total logged time turns that wall of dead cards into a readable status board — and this is the payoff of A1 becoming visible to a human without Lyra involved at all. **Exit criteria:** opening BIT shows, at a glance, which projects are alive. --- # Part B — work in `project-lyra` Everything here needs to know something about Brian. This is where the LLM lives, and it is allowed to be flaky, because a missed nudge costs nothing. ## B1 — client and tools - `lyra/bit.py` — thin HTTP client over BIT's API. **No cadence math**; BIT already computed it. Degrades to a clear "BIT is down" message, never a stack trace into her context and never a fabricated answer about project state. - `lyra/tools.py` additions, following the existing spec + dispatch pattern: - `projects_overview()` — every project with cadence health and logged time - `project_status(name)` — detail, recent sessions, what's actionable - `log_work(project, task, minutes, note)` — **conversational session logging** - `pick_next(minutes_available)` — see B2 - `break_down(task_id)` — generate a subtask tree, push it through BIT's existing JSON import - `set_goal(project, weekly_hours)`, `set_dormant(project)`, `wake(project)` **Conversational logging is how non-code projects get tracked in v1.** The git observer does nothing for the garage or the music collection; "I spent an hour in the garage" → `log_work` → a real `time_logs` row. Zero new infrastructure. Automated observation of physical work is deferred past v1 (see Non-goals). ## B2 — the pick The one place an LLM is genuinely required. Input: `/api/actionable`, minutes available, recent sessions, cadence health, time of day. Output: **one task and one sentence of why.** Not a list — a list is what BIT already does badly, at 68 items. ### The decomposition trigger Live data shows tasks like "Multi-user authentication — est 480" and "Historical data tracking — 360". **You cannot start an eight-hour task**, and these sit in `/actionable` forever radiating "why bother." Rule: `estimated_minutes > DECOMPOSE_THRESHOLD` (default 60) means decomposition hasn't happened yet. When the best candidates are all oversized, Lyra offers to break one down instead of proposing it — closing the anti-perfectionism loop through `break_down`, using the JSON import that already exists for exactly this. ## B3 — surfacing Reuse `thoughts.py` machinery; **do not put projects in the `threads` table.** A thought is her interiority; a project is a fact about Brian's life. Conflating them pollutes both — her dream cycle would generate the garage as a thought, and the garage would appear in her self-narrative. Separate storage, shared salience → surface → ping → response loop. Lyra owns a small table keyed by BIT project id holding **nudge state only**: last surfaced, ignore count, snooze, salience. Cadence itself is read from BIT, never recomputed here. **Channel priority:** 1. **Conversation (default).** Next time Brian's talking to her anyway, she raises it: *"the music backup's been sitting three weeks — dead, or just asleep?"* Not a notification. A person asking. This is the unfair advantage no to-do app has. 2. **Push (rare, budgeted).** Two legal uses only: - the **receipt** — "you've been in there 20 minutes, want me to count it?" (makes no demand, so there's nothing to blow off) - the **backoff** — "I've raised the garage twice and you didn't bite, so I'm putting it to sleep. Say the word and it wakes up." No scheduled daily ping. A clock tick is the most habituation-prone trigger there is; she speaks when something is *true*. **Ignoring changes state:** two ignored surfaces → dormant → she stops. Dormancy needs no BIT schema change — BIT already has per-project custom statuses. --- ## Non-goals — explicitly parked Named to hold the line, because "actually get this functional and helpful for my every day life" is the stated goal and feature creep is the named enemy. - **The ambient card / desktop widget** — the right long-term interface, but a surface on top of a thing that has to work first. - **Generated wallpaper** — same. - **Windows active-window reporter** — the "backwards timer" for physical and non-git work. Deferred past v1. Note it needs no Pieces: ~30 lines reporting active window title covers "which project am I in." - **PiecesOS / MCP integration** — richer, but a cross-machine dependency (PiecesOS is local to the Windows box, Lyra is on the homelab) that must be spiked before anything rests on it. Never load-bearing on day one. - **Phone widget / home-screen surface** — depends on iOS vs Android, unresolved. - **Physical display on the rack** — unblocked (a spare monitor exists; drive it with a Pi or old laptop running a kiosk browser, **not** by installing Xorg on the Proxmox host). It's a browser pointed at a URL this design already produces, so it changes nothing and can be added any time. Put it on the desk, not the rack. - **Automatic blocker detection** — Brian's dependency-graph idea (paint → move furniture → closet access → clothes + desk). Manual blockers are already built and deployed; *auto-identifying* them is the parked part, and it's a natural Lyra job later. **This is the strongest answer to "where do I start" for physical projects** — worth un-parking once v1 is honest. - **Cross-device syncing sticky notes** — a separate product. The sticky's *form* (a small always-visible card) is worth having and needs no sync, because its content is generated server-side. The sync engine is the whole product, and Trilium already does it. - **`% complete` on long-horizon projects** — actively harmful. See principle 1. --- ## Error handling - **BIT unreachable:** every Lyra tool degrades to a clear "BIT is down" message. Never a stack trace into her context, never a fabricated answer about project state. Follows the `notify.py` precedent: a down dependency must not break the loop. - **Git observer failure on one repo:** log and continue. One bad repo must not abort a backfill. - **Duplicate protection:** the `git_sessions` unique key is the guard. A crashed mid-backfill run resumes cleanly. - **Clock skew / commits with future dates:** clamp to today; never create a session in the future. - **Attribution failure:** always falls back to `Unfiled work`. Never raises. --- ## Testing Split by repo, matching each one's existing conventions. ### In BIT (`pytest`, backend) - **Git observer:** fixture repo built in a tmpdir with controlled commit timestamps. Assert day grouping across timezone boundaries, MIN/MAX/padding clamps, conventional-commit scope attribution, `Unfiled work` fallback, and — most importantly — **that a second run produces zero new time logs**. - **Cadence functions:** pure, table-driven. Boundary cases: no goal set, goal met exactly, dormancy threshold ±1 day, zero sessions ever, and the hours-named-but-minutes-valued goal fields. - **`/api/projects/health`:** shape and states against a seeded DB. ### In `project-lyra` (`pytest`, existing `tests/`) - **`lyra/bit.py`:** against a stub server. Include a 404 case so a BIT API change can't silently break it, and assert graceful degradation when BIT is down. - **Nudge state:** ignore counts, backoff to dormant, quiet hours, push budget. Pure and deterministic — no model. - **The pick and the surfacing copy:** replay eval, parameterized by `EVAL_BACKEND`/`EVAL_MODEL`, matching the persona eval pattern. Assert it returns *one* task, and that it offers decomposition when candidates are oversized. ## Open questions 1. **Ports for BIT on this box.** `:3002/:8002` are free here; confirm at deploy. 2. **Which of the 77 snapshotted tasks are worth reseeding**, versus starting the real projects clean. Brian's call during A0. 3. **Whether `weekly_hours_goal` gets set per project at all in v1**, or whether `untracked` + days-since-last-session is enough to start. Leaning: ship without goals, add them once real session data shows what a realistic cadence is.