Watching
Checked recently, on a cadence that can still run.
Standing watch
Set a watch on a subject, and read the record of every check it made.
Most work arrives because a person went looking for it. Some work should arrive because something changed. A standing watch is a durable instruction on a Room: what to watch, why it matters, and how often to look. The Room checks on that cadence and keeps a wake ledger of what it checked, what it could not reach, and what it never attempted.
Access is limited. A person reviews every request.
The charter
A watch is four declared fields, not a subscription.
A feed decides what you see from your behaviour. A watch is bound to words you wrote down, and every later check is read against those words. When the intent changes you amend it, and the amendment stays in the record beside the checks that came before it.
- 01
Watch
A URL, a public repository reference, or a search query. One subject, stated plainly.
- 02
Intent
Why the subject matters and what a change would mean for the work. Every later check is read against this, not against a relevance score.
- 03
Cadence
Hourly, daily, or on event. Event driven watches stay quiet until something arrives in the Room, and silence is their correct state.
- 04
Notice
Whether a material change should raise a question inside the Room for a person to answer.
The reviewable artifact
The wake ledger reports the checks that did not happen.
A quiet watch and a stopped watch look identical from outside, and acting on the difference is the whole point. The ledger keeps them apart. Only an attempt that reached the source counts as a check; an attempt that never got that far is recorded as its own state.
Each of the six states below is a distinct thing that can be true of a watch.
Idle by design
Event driven, and nothing has arrived. Not degraded, not late.
Unknown
Declared, should have run, and no attempt is on the record.
Refused
The most recent attempt stopped at a spend cap before it reached the source.
Could not watch
The most recent attempt reached the source and failed.
Stale
The last check is far older than the watch's own cadence. One missed run is a wobble; three is a stopped watch.
What a watch will not do: widen past the subject it was given, quietly drop a source it can no longer reach, or present a stale reading as a fresh one. A watch that has not run says so on its own face.
One mechanism
A topic room, a news room, a briefing room, a room that moves first.
Those are four names for one charter with a different subject and a different intent. There is no separate product behind any of them, and there will not be one. A vertical is a corpus and a set of grants over the same machinery; the moment a use case needs its own product type, the design has failed.
A topic room
The subject is a question you keep returning to. The watch is that question; the checks accumulate under it.
A news room
The subject is a query or a source. What arrives is filed against the intent you declared, not against what is popular.
A briefing room
The subject is several watches read together. The briefing is the ledger plus what changed, inside the Room.
A room that moves first
A material change raises a question for a person to answer, at the top of the record, without anyone having asked that day.
Not yet
What a watch does not do today.
A Room that can hold a verdict and say not yet owes you the same about itself. Read this section before the rest.
- No action taken on your behalf. A watch reads a source and records what it read. It files nothing, sends nothing, and settles nothing.
- No email, push notification, text message, or phone call reaches you today. A summary-by-email path is built and it is switched off; this page will say otherwise when that changes.
- No spoken brief, no audio overview, no anchor, no generated video. Text and the record only.
- No scheduled delivery to an inbox, a calendar, or a device. You read a watch by opening the Room that holds it.
- No connectors into private systems. A watch reads a URL, a public repository reference, or a search query.
What notice means right now: a watch set to notify raises a question inside its Room when the subject moves materially, and that question waits there for a person. Nothing leaves the Room to find you. A watch is useful when you already open the Room, and not before. That is a real limit rather than a modest description, and it is the first thing worth knowing about a watch.
Access
Start an account, or tell us what you would watch.
An account is the door to the product as it stands today, including everything this page says is not built. Availability of the limited alpha is a separate question: a request is reviewed by a person and does not grant admission, an invitation, an account, a Room, entitlement, or payment access.