Quickstart: the daily loop

This is Cuaderno in five commands. It assumes you’ve installed cdno and created a vault. Run these from inside the vault (or with --vault).

# 1. Start a project (capped at 5 active).
cdno project create --title "Surrogate model" --context work

# 2. Give it a next action, tagged by the energy it needs.
cdno action add --project surrogate-model \
                --title "Run feature set B on the full mesh" \
                --energy deep

# 3. Record a promise with a deadline.
cdno commit create --title "Pay rent" --due 2026-06-01 --context personal

# 4. Each morning: see what's due, your active projects, and a suggested start.
cdno orient --energy deep

# 5. Mark the action done when it's finished (substring match on the bullet).
cdno action complete --project surrogate-model --query "feature set B"

Throughout the day, the two verbs you’ll reach for most:

cdno log "scaled the mesh to 2M cells; runtime 4x, still stable"   # append to today's log
cdno capture "check whether Chen 2025 used the same preconditioner" # drop a thought into the inbox

Interactive vs. scripted

Every write command follows the same convention (see CLI overview):

• In a terminal, omit a required flag and cdno prompts you for it, then asks you to confirm before writing.
• In a script, pipe, or with --no-interactive, a missing required flag is an error instead — so automation never blocks on a prompt.

# Interactive: cdno asks for the title and context.
cdno project create

# Scripted: everything supplied, no prompts.
cdno project create --title "Surrogate model" --context work --no-interactive

Machine-readable output

Add --json to any read or write verb to get structured output instead of a formatted table. Read verbs emit their listing/detail; write verbs emit a { "path": ..., "message": ... } result and run non-interactively. Great for scripts and for piping into jq.

cdno project list --json | jq '.[].slug'
cdno project create --title "Surrogate model" --context work --json
# -> { "path": "projects/surrogate-model.md", "message": "Created projects/surrogate-model.md" }

See JSON output for the full shapes.

Where to go next

• Understand the model: The Research Logbook Method.
• Work through each workflow: Tutorials.
• Let Claude drive: Connect to Claude.