The daily loop

The core rhythm of Cuaderno is a daily loop: orient → act → log → close. None of it is mandatory or guilt-inducing; it’s a habit that keeps the vault current with almost no overhead.

Morning: orient

Start the day by asking the tool what deserves attention:

cdno orient --energy deep

orient shows commitments due soon, your active projects with their current state and top next action, and a single suggested starting point — biased toward the energy you tell it you have. Drop --energy to get a neutral suggestion; pass --energy light on a low day.

Want just the project snapshot without commitments? Use cdno status.

Through the day: act and log

As you work, two verbs carry most of the weight.

Log what happens — append a timestamped line to today’s journal:

cdno log "scaled the mesh to 2M cells; 4x runtime, still stable"

Capture stray thoughts without breaking flow — they land in the inbox for later triage:

cdno capture "does Chen 2025 use the same preconditioner?"

Make progress on projects as you go:

# Add the next action you just thought of:
cdno action add --project surrogate-model --title "Profile the assembly step" --energy medium

# Record where a project now stands (auto-logs the previous state to today's journal):
cdno project state --slug surrogate-model --text "Mesh scaling works; assembly is the bottleneck"

# File a useful result into the right portfolio:
cdno file --portfolio sparse-vs-dense-ood --source "ablation run B" --origin projects/surrogate-model

# Tick off a finished action (substring match on the bullet):
cdno action complete --project surrogate-model --query "feature set B"

Evening: close

A light wind-down — note anything for your stewardships and reflect:

# Log a tracked activity under a stewardship:
cdno track gym --stewardship health --content "Upper body; good energy"

# A closing reflection is just another log line:
cdno log "good focus day; pick up assembly profiling tomorrow"

That’s it. The journal now holds a faithful record of the day, your projects reflect reality, and tomorrow’s orient will pick up where you left off.

Letting Claude run the loop

Each step has an MCP equivalent (get_orientation, append_to_log, add_action, update_project_state, …), so an assistant can drive the same loop conversationally. See Connect to Claude and the example skills.

Next: Managing projects.