project-lyra/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-02-project-cadence-design.md

# 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 runs in Docker; the git repos live on the host. So the
observer runs **on the host** (cron or systemd timer) and POSTs to BIT's API like
any other client. That avoids volume-mounting every repo into the container while
keeping the code in BIT's repo where it belongs.

### 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.