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.

If you left something open yesterday, cdno now still shows it this morning, with the day named. Pick it up with cdno action resume, or set it aside with cdno action pause --next "…" and choose something else. orient itself does not list the focus or your paused work; cdno now does.

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

# Say what you are starting, so `cdno now` can answer for you later:
cdno action start --project surrogate-model --query "assembly step"

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

When you lose the thread, ask what you were doing rather than guessing:

$ cdno now
On surrogate-model — Profile the assembly step (medium), since 09:30 (1h 30m).

There is no state behind that — it replays today’s journal and yesterday’s (the [focus] carry_over_days window in .cuaderno/config.toml), so a start made here, or by an agent over MCP all count equally, and completing, dropping or pausing the action clears it. With nothing open it says so, and shows the last thing you paused and the note you left yourself. See cdno now for the full shape, including what a start typed by hand has to look like.

When the day changes direction, say so rather than stacking one thing on another. Starting a second action while one is open is refused; the way through is a verb:

# Stopping for now, with a note to your future self:
cdno action pause --next 'pick up at "Prior approaches"'

# Moving to something else right now (a pause and a start together):
cdno action switch --project other-project --query "CI"

# Coming back; prints the note you left:
cdno action resume

Each one is a line in the journal, so the record shows when you moved and, if you said, why. When you capture a thought while something is in focus, the inbox item remembers which project you were on. See Focus.

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. Anything still in focus at midnight is carried into tomorrow, and cdno action pause is the way to put it down on purpose.

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.