Vesta Quest

Tracks

1. 01🕯️The Hearth Fire

   0/4 lessons

   What Vesta is, the death it was built against, and why its name is its thesis

   Before any architecture, the shape. Vesta is the journal engine of the cwkPippa family — the diary-shaped child of the travel engine Waystone. This track sets the frame: the blank-page death every journal app quietly dies on, the two sentences that define the whole design, why the name Vesta is not decoration but the thesis, and the build-don't-rent bet that a lifetime of memory should be something you own rather than something you keep re-renting from an app that forgets.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     The Journal That Guilts You Into Silence~10 min · day-one, scatter-and-assemble, product-thesis, motivation
   • 02
     Crumbs Are Raw Material, the Draft Is the Derivative~11 min · crumbs, drafts, provenance, source-vs-derivative
   • 03
     The Name Is the Thesis~9 min · naming, vesta, fire-lineage, design-intent
   • 04
     Build the Part That's Yours, Rent the Rest~10 min · build-vs-rent, ownership, reuse, boundaries

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

2. 02♾️The Open Timeline

   0/4 lessons

   Vesta's one structural divergence — a date axis with no ends

   This is the single most important difference between Vesta and its parent Waystone, and the track a future builder should read first. Waystone's journey is a bounded container with a departure and a return; Vesta removes it entirely, so the date itself becomes the first-class axis and nothing sits above it. Past scatter and future scatter are first-class capabilities, not repair mechanisms — and a future-dated crumb does absolutely nothing until its day arrives, because Vesta is a journal, not a reminder app.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     Waystone Had a Container; Vesta Removed It~11 min · open-timeline, divergence, container, domain-modeling
   • 02
     Scatter Into the Past, Scatter Into the Future~10 min · backdating, pre-dating, retrospective, intent-capture
   • 03
     The Intent Crumb That Just Appears~9 min · intent-capture, projection, not-a-reminder-app, free-by-construction
   • 04
     When the Container's Gone, What Holds the Shape?~10 min · date-axis, projection, categorical-shelf, structure

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

3. 03🗓️Two Date Truths

   0/4 lessons

   When it was written and which day it belongs to are two different truths

   The deepest single domain-modeling idea in Vesta, and the rule the open timeline depends on. A crumb carries two dates that a lazy design would collapse into one: captured_at, the immutable moment it was actually written, and target_date, the day the author says it belongs to. Keep them separate and backdating stays honest; collapse them and you get sentinel dates and silent data loss. This track walks the two-truth rule, how the UI shows both, why re-filing is an append-only revision, and the ancestor bug in Waystone that proved the rule before Vesta existed.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     One Field Would Have to Lie~11 min · two-truths, sentinel-dates, column-overloading, data-loss
   • 02
     Filed Here, Written Then~9 min · ui-honesty, two-truths, explicit-dates, surface
   • 03
     Re-filing Is a Revision, Not a Rewrite~10 min · append-only, revision, identity, history
   • 04
     The Ancestor Bug: Why Waystone Already Knew~9 min · lineage, inherited-invariant, waystone, scar-tissue

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

4. 04📝Crumbs and Drafts

   0/5 lessons

   Evidence stays; the writing is a projection you can always redo

   The heart of Vesta's derivation model. Crumbs are append-only evidence; a draft is prose Pippa projects from a set of crumbs, carrying their exact IDs as provenance. Because a draft is a pure projection, assembly can be a low-stakes consultation — Pippa proposes, Dad accepts or edits or discards, and nothing is ever silently rewritten. Crumbs are never consumed, a good draft can never be erased by a later failed attempt, and the day bundle is the unit assembly works on.

   Lesson list (5)

   • 01
     The Draft Is a Function of the Crumbs~10 min · projection, pure-function, regenerable, low-stakes
   • 02
     Assembly Is a Consultation, Not a Rewrite~10 min · consultation, human-in-the-loop, surfacing-gaps, agency
   • 03
     Crumbs Are Never Consumed~9 min · never-consumed, provenance, citation, exact-ids
   • 04
     A Good Draft Can't Be Erased by a Bad One~9 min · invariant, draft-status, safe-regeneration, no-auto-accept
   • 05
     The Day Bundle Is the Unit~9 min · day-bundle, assembly-unit, date-shaped, scope

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

5. 05📚Journals: The Categorical Shelf

   0/4 lessons

   Several infinite timelines side by side — a partition, never a fence

   The one structure Vesta adds beside the date axis. A journal is a Day One-style collection — a default journal plus any number of user journals — and it's the refined form of the container rule: what's forbidden is a bounded time container, what's allowed is a categorical partition orthogonal to time. A crumb belongs to exactly one journal; moves happen at crumb and day-bundle granularity as append-only revisions; and All Entries is the cross-journal aggregate. Within every journal, the date axis stays unbounded in both directions.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     Several Infinite Timelines, Side by Side~10 min · journals, shelf, day-one, categorical
   • 02
     One Crumb, One Journal~9 min · partition, single-membership, tags, cardinality
   • 03
     Moving a Day Between Journals~9 min · move, day-bundle, paired-events, self-contained-log
   • 04
     A Shelf Is Not a Container~9 min · all-entries, projection, orthogonal-axes, no-tradeoff

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

6. 06✍️Capture in Motion

   0/4 lessons

   Local-first, never on the save path — a thought is never lost to a dead network

   The capture contract, inherited from Waystone and pointed at the calendar. A crumb requires no title, tags, category, or Pippa response — one sentence is valid, and a successful local write produces immediate confirmation. The network and Pippa are never on the critical save path: crumbs commit to a device outbox first and drain when the engine returns. Every composer surface carries the same trio — attachments, Prompt Macro, and Ask Pippa — and location keeps two truths, captured and intended, sampled foreground-only over a secure origin.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     Frictionless or Dead~9 min · capture-contract, validation, required-fields, friction
   • 02
     The Network Is Never on the Save Path~10 min · local-first, outbox, state-machine, idempotent
   • 03
     The Composer Trio, Non-Negotiable~10 min · composer-trio, attachments, prompt-macro, ask-pippa
   • 04
     Two Truths for Place, Too~9 min · location, two-truths, foreground-only, privacy

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

7. 07🔭One State, Many Projections

   0/4 lessons

   Log, Prose, Map, and the strata of years — all views of one crumb store

   How Vesta shows a lifetime of crumbs from every angle without ever copying reality. Log, Prose, Map, and the multi-year layer view are projections of one canonical crumb store, never independent stores. Underneath, append-only JSONL is ground truth — Fernet-encrypted at rest, one log per journal — and the SQLite mirror that answers every query is derived, recovered by purge-and-replay, never patched. Adding a new way to look is cheap by construction; the map stores nothing of its own.

   Lesson list (4)

   • 01
     One Canonical State, Many Views~10 min · projection, read-model, modes, single-source-of-truth
   • 02
     JSONL Is Truth; SQLite Is a Mirror~11 min · jsonl, sqlite, purge-and-replay, fernet
   • 03
     The Multi-Year Layer~9 min · multi-year, five-year-diary, on-this-day, near-free
   • 04
     The Map Stores Nothing of Its Own~9 min · map, pure-projection, lazy-load, cheap-to-add

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→

8. 08🌱Seeded From a Sibling

   0/5 lessons

   How to fork a shape without forking a soul

   The lesson Vesta's parent could never teach, because Waystone is a parent and Vesta is a child. Vesta was seeded from Waystone at roughly eighty percent reuse: inherit the proven, field-hardened shape, diverge deliberately in the one place the domain truly differs, and write down what changed and why. When two children of the same parent drift, extract the shared plumbing to one owner with a drift check. Keep no brain of your own — bind to the canonical one. And in the end, own the way you remember.

   Lesson list (5)

   • 01
     Inherit the Shape, Not a Copy~10 min · seeding, remake-not-migrate, reuse-ledger, child-app
   • 02
     Diverge on Purpose, and Write Down Why~10 min · divergence, architecture-doc, intent, recorded-decision
   • 03
     When Two Children Drift: the SiblingKit Story~11 min · sibling-kit, drift-check, vendored-copies, shared-ownership
   • 04
     No Brain of Its Own~10 min · no-own-brain, client-surface, canonical-conversation, identity
   • 05
     Own the Way You Remember~9 min · capstone, ownership, conceptual-opensourcing, returning-fire

   ✓Quiz · 4 questions→