Managing projects

A project is a lightweight map of a piece of active work: a current state, next actions, milestones, and things you’re waiting on. You keep at most five active at once. All the verbs live under cdno project (plus cdno action for the next-action list).

Create one

cdno project create --title "Surrogate model" --context work
# -> projects/surrogate-model.md   (slug derived from the title)

--context is the life domain. Optionally link the project’s core question with --question questions/research/surrogate-cost. If you’re already at five active projects, the new one is created parked — activate it once you free a slot.

See where things stand

cdno project list                 # active projects + a state snippet
cdno project show surrogate-model # one project in detail
cdno status                       # all active projects + their top action

Add --json to any of these for structured output (see JSON output).

Update the current state

The Current State is the project’s one mutable paragraph — “where is this right now?”. Updating it auto-logs the previous state to today’s journal first, so you never lose the trail:

cdno project state --slug surrogate-model \
  --text "Mesh scaling works to 2M cells; assembly is now the bottleneck"

Next actions

Actions are the things to do next. By default they’re inline bullets on the project:

cdno action add --project surrogate-model --title "Profile the assembly step" --energy medium
cdno action list --project surrogate-model
cdno action complete --project surrogate-model --query "profile the assembly"

See Actions for the inline-vs-manifest distinction and promotion.

Milestones

Milestones are dated markers of progress. Mark one --hard to make it a real deadline that shows up in the aggregated commitments view:

cdno project milestone add --slug surrogate-model --title "Submit to ICML" --date 2026-01-22 --hard
cdno project milestone done --slug surrogate-model --query "submit to icml"

Waiting-on

Track external blockers so they’re visible instead of forgotten:

cdno project waiting add --slug surrogate-model --description "Cluster quota increase from IT"
cdno project waiting resolve --slug surrogate-model --query "cluster quota"

Park and re-activate

Parking is first-class and reversible — it’s how you respect the five-project cap without deleting anything:

cdno project park --slug surrogate-model        # -> projects/_parked/, frees a slot
cdno project activate --slug surrogate-model     # bring it back (must be under the cap)

Next: Research and evidence.