cdno now

What you are in the middle of: the most recent action started and not yet closed.

cdno now [OPTIONS]

There is no state behind this. It replays today’s ## Logs, so a start made from cdno action start, from an agent over MCP, or typed into the daily note by hand all count — and a completion or a drop clears it. Nothing to keep in sync, and nothing to go stale.

One verb breaks the pairing: cdno action promote rewrites the bullet it matched, so promoting between a start and its close leaves cdno now naming the old text for the rest of the day, and action complete and action drop then match nothing.

A line you type yourself has to match the shape the writers emit:

- **09:30**: started [[surrogate-model]] — Draft the methods section (deep)

Both halves are required. The - **HH:MM**: stamp is what makes the line a log entry at all, and the separator is an em dash (U+2014), not a hyphen. The parser requires that exact codepoint, so that ordinary prose beginning “started something” is never mistaken for a focus. That strictness means a line missing the stamp, or typed with -, is simply not picked up here — but cdno lint reports it, naming the line and the likely cause, so a near-miss does not stay invisible.

$ cdno now
surrogate-model since 09:30 · 1h 30m
  Draft the methods section (deep)

With nothing open it says so rather than printing an empty frame:

$ cdno now
Nothing started yet. `cdno orient` suggests one thing to begin.

--json emits {project, action, started}, all three null when nothing is open — so a caller can test one field without first branching on the shape of the document.

The action field is the bullet text exactly as logged, energy suffix and all. That is the same string cdno action complete matches, which is why the pairing works.

Related MCP tools

current_focus — the same read, for an agent.

See also

• action start — what puts something here.
• orient — what to begin when nothing is open.