"Nobody starts a trip with clean data. They start with a mess — and the mess is the raw material, not the enemy."
The Real Starting Point
A travel-planning tool that demands structured input has already lost, because real plans do not arrive structured. They arrive as a wall of pasted text, a half-formatted note, a forwarded email, or — the canonical case — a photograph of Mom's OneNote table. Carve is Waystone's answer to that reality. Its name says the whole idea: rough stone in, waystone out. You hand it the raw material in whatever shape it exists, and Pippa carves it into a shaped scaffold you can actually plan against.
The Scaffold Is the Plan
What Carve produces is not a separate structured record off to the side — it is the plan document itself, written in a canonical day-section grammar. Each day is a dated heading with soft-labeled bullets underneath (lodging, transport, plan, alternatives, notes). The dated heading is the one hard rule, because the entire app derives its day navigation — the log sidebar, the calendar, the day chips — from those headings, and the future Start Logging transaction will mint day records by parsing the same grammar. Carve does not invent a new format; it pours the mess into the one shape the whole engine already speaks.
Vision Is a First-Class Input
The OneNote photograph is not a party trick — it is a first-class input path. Screenshots ride a vision lane so that a photographed table, a handwritten itinerary, or a screenshot of a booking confirmation are all legitimate raw stone. This matters because the person who prepared the rough plan (Mom, a travel agent, your past self) almost never prepared it in a format a parser would like. Meeting the plan where it actually lives — including as an image — is what makes Carve useful on real trips instead of only on tidy ones.