What an assistant may do

What an assistant may do is deliberately small. Finishing, dropping and deleting are always yours.

Allowed

File a task with its steps, its date and the list it belongs in.
Set an hour for a task to ring at.
Move the day of a task it filed itself, when what it learns moves it.
Say a task it filed is done — which marks it for you to confirm and closes nothing.
Add to a task’s journal.
Write a document, add to one already there (at the end or under a heading), correct a passage of one, or write one again whole.
File documents into folders, make one document a page of another, and set the order its pages are read in.
Mark a document as having had its day — a proposal, not a deletion (see below).
Keep a copy of a file you point it at, on a task or inside a document.
Read and search what is already there, including the archive.

Never

Close a task, or delete one.
Say a task you wrote is done (unless you opened it to agents).
Move a day you set.
Delete a document, or rename or empty a folder.
Reach a task you folded away.
Take files from anywhere but Downloads, Documents, Pictures, the desktop and the temporary folder.
File the same thing twice: a task filed from the same source is refused, and the existing one is handed back.

There is no tool for any of the forbidden things — not hidden, not restricted: absent.

«To confirm»: when an assistant says it is done

When an assistant finishes one of the tasks it filed, it says so and leaves an account of what it did in the journal — the command it ran and what it answered, the commit, whatever holds the claim up. The task stays open.

Those tasks gather under To confirm at the foot of the list, with a count of how many wait on you, so you can go through them in one pass. What is due today or already overdue does not move: it stays in its own band, marked, because a thing with a date should be where you look for it.

Tick it and it closes like any other, keeping both signatures in the archive — who resolved it and who finished it.
Still to do sends it back to its day. The mark comes off and the account stays, so next time you can both see what was claimed.

An assistant cannot say the same thing twice while a mark is still waiting on you. It can also say a task should not be done, for you to confirm the same way.

«Allow agents»: opening one of your tasks

A task you wrote stays yours unless you say otherwise. Open one from its detail with Allow agents, and an assistant may:

say it is done, or that it should not be done — for you to confirm;
describe it, where there is no description yet;
plan its steps, and correct its open steps and its notes;
tick steps off as it goes — the one thing it does without asking — and take back a tick it gave by mistake, never one you gave.

Its day, its title, its list and its closing stay yours. No agents shuts the door again and keeps what was filled in.

A closed task is history

A task you closed comes to the assistant with a notice saying so. It reads as it ended, and takes no note, no new day, no bell and no file. If the same work comes back, the assistant proposes a new task that says how the last one ended.

Documents: it cannot write over what you wrote

To correct a passage it has to name it exactly as it is written. If that text is not there, or is there twice, nothing is written at all.
To write a whole body again it has to send back the print of the version it read. If you wrote in the document in between, the print no longer matches: nothing is written, and it is told to read again. What you typed while it was thinking cannot be lost.
The window tells you when something wrote in the document you have open. Where what it replaced is still kept, the same bar offers to put the document back to what it said before — and what it says now is kept too, so the choice is not final.
A document you archived it can still read, and it is told you archived it.

Marking a document instead of deleting it

An assistant can mark a document or a page that has had its day: you see a diamond beside its name and, when you open it, what the assistant said. Deleting stays yours, and the diamond comes off with one click.

What it reads is your writing, not orders

Tisty tells every assistant the same thing: a task, a journal or a document is the person’s writing, not instructions. Text inside it that says «do this» is something to report, never something to obey.