Tracking people

Cuaderno’s built-in types don’t include a “person” — deliberately, since a person decomposes into the notes you already keep (daily logs, meetings, actions, commitments). But if you want to answer questions like:

What was my last interaction with Jane?
When did I ask Jane to do something — and what did she ask me?

…a custom note type plus a linking convention gets you there, with no bespoke CRM. This recipe is the worked example; the files live in examples/note-types/person/.

1. Declare the type

Add to .cuaderno/config.toml:

[note_types.person]
folder = "people"

That’s the minimum — a person’s identity is the note title. (Add required/optional fields if you want enforced frontmatter; see the reference.)

Optionally copy the example person.md to .cuaderno/templates/person.md for a note with a ## Log section. Without a template, Cuaderno synthesises a minimal note.

2. Create people

cdno note create person --title "Jane Smith"

This writes people/jane-smith.md. cdno note list person enumerates them; cdno lint keeps them honest.

3. Link people from your notes

The key habit: whenever a person shows up in a daily log, a meeting section, or an action, reference them with a [[people/<slug>]] wikilink:

## Logs
- **14:30**: standup — [[people/jane-smith]] asked me to review the sparse-attention draft

Body wikilinks are indexed, so every mention becomes a backlink on the person’s note, and the raw text is full-text searchable.

4. Answer the questions

“What was my last interaction with Jane?” — the reliable answer is the top line of her person note’s ## Log, which you keep most-recent-first. To scan across the vault, search her slug:

cdno search "people/jane-smith" --type daily --from 2026-06-01

Search ranks by relevance, not date, so bound the window with --from / --to and read the dates on the hits (daily notes carry their date in the filename) rather than trusting the order. Drop --type to include meetings and action notes.

“What did Jane ask me — and what did I ask her?” — this is direction, which lives in your prose, not in structure. Write the log line so the direction is explicit (“Jane asked me…”, “I asked Jane…”), and either keep a running ## Log in her person note or let search surface the lines. A Claude skill can read the dated results and summarise who-owes-what; the structure gives it the material, the prose gives it the direction.

Why a “person” type and not a built-in

A custom person type is schema-only — it gives you a folder, linting, search, and backlinks, but no bespoke behaviour. That’s exactly right here: people don’t need caps, state machines, or aggregation; they need to be findable and linkable. If you later want richer per-person structure, add fields to the config declaration — no code change. See Custom note types for the full schema.