Actions

An action is the next concrete thing to do on a project. Cuaderno treats actions as cheap by default: the normal form is a single bullet on the project map, not a note you have to create and maintain. You only give an action its own note when it grows into real investigation. All verbs live under cdno action.

Add a next action

cdno action add --project surrogate-model --title "Profile the assembly step" --energy medium

This appends a checkbox bullet to the project’s next-actions list, tagged with its energy. That’s usually all an action ever is.

List open actions

cdno action list --project surrogate-model

Bullets that have been promoted to notes show their status (active / blocked / completed) inline. --json gives the structured list.

Promote an action to a manifest note

When an action becomes an investigation that spans days and produces evidence, promote it. This rewrites the bullet as a wikilink and scaffolds an action note (with status, energy, criteria, links). The match is a case-insensitive substring of the bullet text; energy is inherited:

cdno action promote --project surrogate-model --query "profile the assembly"

You can also create an action already promoted by passing --note to add:

cdno action add --project surrogate-model \
                --title "Characterise sample efficiency across mesh sizes" \
                --energy deep --note

Complete an action

Completing matches a bullet by substring, ticks it off, and logs it to today’s journal. If the action had a manifest note, that note is archived to actions/_done/<year>/ and becomes append-only:

cdno action complete --project surrogate-model --query "feature set B"

Inline vs. manifest — when to promote

Keeping the default cheap is deliberate — it means capturing the next step never costs more than a sentence. See The Research Logbook Method for the rationale.

Next: Commitments and deadlines.