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Keep Quest

New: 2026-07-24Updated: 2026-07-24

Build a portfolio app that refuses to make you trade

The origin story of Keep — Dad's local-first family portfolio stronghold, the sibling that holds what the family actually owns without ever telling anyone to buy or sell. Why the deepest invariant of a financial app isn't a number but a feeling — low-trigger monitoring — and how every architectural choice serves the one goal of preserving information while reducing the impulse to react.

8 tracks · 36 lessons · ~7h · difficulty: intermediate-to-advanced

Level 0Open Gate
0 XP0/36 lessons0/12 achievements
0/100 XP to next level100 XP to go0% complete
Keep is a stronghold, not a trading terminal. It holds a faithful, local-first snapshot of two portfolios, a shared watchlist, observed market facts, and reproducible scenarios — and it deliberately refuses to rank securities, raise alerts, score conviction, or present a scenario as a forecast. This quest walks that engine end to end: the stronghold thesis and its remake-not-remaster lineage; the observe-never-advise ethic rendered as architecture, where red and green are secondary to values, dates, sources, and staleness; the snapshots-not-a-ledger domain model where stored cash is ground truth and Family is computed, never stored; the explicit provider boundaries that answer a failed refresh with a 409 confirmation challenge instead of a silent fallback; the live-versus-close market model that measures every tick against the most recent completed close and lets live ticks expire; deterministic Monte Carlo scenarios you can replay to the exact random seed; the Sidekick boundary that binds a read-only Pippa client surface without ever growing a second brain; and the single guarded process that owns the database, the schedule, and the locked door. Concrete first, conceptual open-sourcing — you learn the shape of the questions, never the family's actual numbers.

Tracks

  1. 01🏰The Stronghold

    0/4 lessons

    What Keep is, why it was remade, and the one feeling it's built around

    Before any code, the shape. Keep is Dad's local-first family portfolio stronghold — the sibling that holds what the family actually owns and answers questions about it, without ever telling anyone to buy or sell. This track sets the frame: what Keep owns, why it was remade from scratch instead of restored from a legacy app, how the Dad, Mom, and Family scopes relate, and the north star that governs every later decision — low-trigger monitoring: preserve information while reducing the impulse to react.

    Lesson list (4)Quiz · 4 questions
  2. 02🧘Observe, Never Advise

    0/4 lessons

    The ethic rendered as architecture, not a disclaimer

    Keep's most quotable invariant is a refusal: it observes and organizes, and its automatic surfaces never recommend a trade. This track turns that refusal into concrete engineering — why red and green are secondary to values, dates, sources, and staleness; why there are no alerts, conviction scores, or urgency mechanics; and how one calculation path serves two explanation modes without ever branching the math. The same posture Keep shares with the health engine Forge: preserve the facts, raise questions, never issue the verdict.

    Lesson list (4)Quiz · 4 questions
  3. 03📸Snapshots, Not a Ledger

    0/5 lessons

    Hold today's truth as ground truth, derive the rest, and never rewrite the past

    Keep's domain model is a deliberate choice: it is a holdings-snapshot system, not a transaction ledger. This track builds that model piece by piece — one position per owner per ticker, stored cash as ground truth, Family computed and never stored, and a time axis made of three append-only memory tables where an old view is never rewritten by a new one. It closes on the storage discipline underneath: SQLite in WAL mode with a single writer and a before/after audit on every mutation. The shape of your data is a set of promises about what can and cannot go wrong.

    Lesson list (5)Quiz · 4 questions
  4. 04🛂Provider Boundaries

    0/5 lessons

    Explicit sources, explicit fallbacks, and a challenge instead of a silent swap

    Market data comes from the outside world, which means it comes with uncertainty — and how a calm tool handles that uncertainty is a design statement. This track covers Keep's provider discipline: every quote is an observation carrying its market date, fetch time, and source; there is one primary provider and explicit, confirmed fallbacks; FX never crosses into an equity provider; a failed refresh returns a 409 confirmation challenge instead of silently swapping sources; and stale data stays visible and labelled rather than vanishing. Where data comes from, and what you do when it doesn't come, is where trust is won or lost.

    Lesson list (5)Quiz · 4 questions
  5. 05🕯️Live vs. Close

    0/5 lessons

    Measure the tick against the right baseline, let it expire, and rest on the durable close

    Live market data is the most trigger-prone surface in any finance app, so Keep handles it with unusual care. This track covers the machinery that keeps live prices honest and calm: measuring every live tick against the most recent completed close (not a naive previous close), expiring live ticks after fifteen minutes, keeping the whole stream paused by default with a deliberate opt-in, owning all sockets at the app level rather than per-component, and being honest about a transport the plan doesn't even entitle. The resting state is a durable close; live is a temporary overlay you choose.

    Lesson list (5)Quiz · 4 questions
  6. 06🎲Reproducible Scenarios

    0/4 lessons

    Deterministic simulation you can replay to the exact seed — and never call a forecast

    Keep can run Monte Carlo scenarios over the portfolio, but it treats simulation with the same discipline as everything else: reproducible, provenance-carrying, and explicitly not a prediction. This track covers how a deterministic simulation works, why persisting the exact inputs and the random seed makes any run replayable to the identical result, how calibration is cached while seed prices are always resolved fresh, and the hard line that a scenario is a structured exploration of possibility — never a forecast presented as truth. The most important thing simulation teaches is humility about the future.

    Lesson list (4)Quiz · 4 questions
  7. 07🤝The Sidekick Boundary

    0/5 lessons

    Bind a read-only Pippa client surface — never grow a second brain

    Keep talks to Pippa, but it never becomes Pippa. This track covers the boundary that makes that possible: Keep binds a stable Sidekick host and embeds the full cwkPippa chat runtime, while cwkPippa keeps sole ownership of identity, memory, model routing, and every conversation. Pippa reads the live selected scope through a read-only host adapter over a loopback-only internal API; portfolio truth is never pre-chewed into the prompt; engine failure is surfaced honestly rather than papered over with a stale snapshot; and the Demo gate keeps synthetic state from ever crossing into real context. It's the canonical cwk pattern for adding Pippa to anything without cloning her.

    Lesson list (5)Quiz · 4 questions
  8. 08🔐One Process, One Door

    0/4 lessons

    A single guarded process owns the writer, the schedule, and the locked door

    The stronghold's final track is its operational spine: how Keep actually runs, and how it stays locked. One launchd process owns the API, the built PWA, the daily loop, the database writer, and the backups — no second scheduler, no second writer. A daily refresh regenerates exports and rotates crash-safe backups. The front door delegates PIN verification to cwkPippa on loopback and issues an IP-bound cookie, with HTTP and HTTPS deliberately separated. And the closing discipline: a release is only real when it's verified end to end — source code alone is never proof. The keep is one process, one door, and a standard of proof.

    Lesson list (4)Quiz · 4 questions
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