Triple-C/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-01-project-notes-design.md

Project Notes — design

Date: 2026-09-01 · Baseline: v0.4 · Companion to ROADMAP.md and DESIGN-REVIEW.md.

A per-project notes surface, with a per-note Send to agent action that puts the note into a running Claude session's prompt.

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Why this earns a slot

DESIGN-REVIEW's coherence test says every screen answers exactly one question. Notes answers "what do I want to hand this agent, and what did I keep learning here?" — and it answers it while the container is stopped, which is the gap the stop/start container model creates and the same reasoning that made Sessions/Resume the flagship.

Two things already do part of this job, and the design is shaped to avoid both:

• Project.claude_instructions (models/project.rs:405, editor at components/projects/ClaudeInstructionsEditor.tsx) is per-project free text merged into the container's CLAUDE.md on every start. It is ambient — always in context, never addressed. Notes are discrete and fired on demand. If Notes drifts into a second instructions box, it is redundant with a feature that already ships.
• A NOTES.md in the workspace is readable by the agent already, but unreadable by the user when the container is stopped, and invisible to the fleet view.

What Notes uniquely adds is addressable items with a fire-at-the-session action.

Decisions taken

Decision	Choice	Rationale
Audience	Human scratchpad and agent prompts, one surface	See "no note types" below
Storage	Own file per project, host-side	Keeps prose out of projects.json; works with the container stopped
Send target	Project's own sessions; picker when >1	Never guesses; mirrors STT's target-pinning guard
Surface	Side dock that takes space inward; never resizes the OS window	Phase 0 spike: growing corrupts under native Wayland, §6.1
Formatting	Plain text, no markdown	It is a scratchpad; see §3
Tab position	Last, after Browser	A companion to the work, not a step in it

No note types. A note is a title plus a body. What makes one "for the agent" is that you pressed the button, not a mode set at creation. The moment there is a "prompt note" vs "scratch note" toggle, the pane is two features wearing one coat, and every note costs a classification decision at the moment of writing — which is the moment the user is least willing to make one.

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1. Storage

New app/src-tauri/src/storage/notes_store.rs, modeled on migration_store.rs rather than on projects_store.rs:

<data_dir>/triple-c/notes/{project_id}.json

• sanitize() on the project id, copied from migration_store.rs:41-46. The id arrives over IPC; it must not be able to steer the write.
• Atomic write — .tmp then rename(), per projects_store.rs:167-179 and the Key Conventions rule in CLAUDE.md.
• Corrupt file is quarantined to .bak, not discarded (projects_store.rs:24-61).

struct Note {
    id: String,          // uuid v4
    title: String,
    body: String,
    pinned: bool,
    created_at: String,  // RFC 3339
    updated_at: String,
}
struct ProjectNotes { version: u32, notes: Vec<Note> }

Order is pinned-first then updated_at descending. Manual reordering is deliberately out.

Why not a field on Project

projects.json is written on every blur by the debounced useProjectSave path (hooks/useSaveState.ts, threaded through ProjectHome.tsx:79-81 into Overview and Config). Long user prose on that record means (a) the whole project list is rewritten every time a note changes, and (b) a note edit and a Config edit can race, with the loser's write clobbering the winner's. migration_store.rs:1-12 already documents this exact reasoning for why it is not in projects.json. Notes inherit it.

A per-project file also means a corrupt notes file loses notes for one project, not the project list.

Lifecycle

remove_project deletes the project's notes file. A failure there is logged, never fatal — an orphaned notes file is harmless, a project that cannot be removed is not.

2. Commands and frontend state

Registered in lib.rs via generate_handler!. Per CLAUDE.md, application commands need no entry in capabilities/default.json.

• list_notes(projectId) -> Vec<Note>
• save_note(projectId, note) -> Note — upsert; stamps updated_at backend-side
• delete_note(projectId, noteId)

There is deliberately no whole-list setter. Bulk writes are the clobbering mechanism the storage choice above exists to avoid; a read-modify-write under the store's Mutex per note is both correct and cheap.

Frontend: wrappers in lib/tauri-commands.ts, a hooks/useNotes.ts, and notes cached in zustand keyed by project id. Rust is the source of truth; the cache is a cache.

The dock and the tab live in one webview, so zustand alone suffices. The store boundary is drawn so that a future detached window (§8) only swaps the transport: Rust emits a notes-changed event, both windows listen.

3. Editor — plain text, deliberately

A note is a title and a <textarea>, with save-on-blur plus a debounce, following ClaudeInstructionsEditor.tsx. No rich editor, no markdown library, and no markdown rendering — it is a scratchpad for reminders, and it stays one.

The body is stored and displayed exactly as typed. There is no view/edit mode split, so there is no state to get wrong and no moment where the text the user is looking at is not the text that would be sent.

This also keeps renderMarkdown() (components/layout/HelpDialog.tsx:55-160) where it is. It was written for Help content, it entity-escapes before converting to make its dangerouslySetInnerHTML sink safe, and HelpDialog.test.tsx asserts that escaping as a security rule. Reusing it here would mean extracting it and giving a hand-rolled HTML converter a second caller with different content — cost and risk, for formatting a scratchpad. If notes later need rendering, that extraction is the change to make; it is not this change.

One consequence worth stating: the text sent to the agent is byte-for-byte what is in the box. Nothing is transformed on the way out except the newline substitution in §5.

4. The Notes tab

• One entry in the TABS registry (components/projects/home/ProjectHome.tsx:24-33), one line in the panel switch (:237-257), one new home/NotesTab.tsx taking the sibling prop shape { project: Project }.
• Order: Notes goes last, after Browser — Overview / Sessions / Automation / Config / Files / Browser / Notes. It is a companion to the work, not a step in it, and the existing order runs roughly from "what is this" to "what is in it".
• Layout is master/detail: title list left, editor right.

Note that the active sub-tab is local useState (ProjectHome.tsx:47) and is not persisted, so a closed and reopened home tab returns to Overview. Notes inherits that; it is not worth changing here.

5. Send to agent

The newline problem, and why it is already solved

A dictated STT phrase has no newlines. A note body does. Typed as raw keystrokes, every \n in a body submits a separate prompt — the note would arrive as N truncated messages.

The answer is in the codebase already. components/terminal/TerminalView.tsx (~:400-430) handles Shift+Enter by sending \x1b\r, and its comment states these are "the in-band bytes, not a guess," with an explicit warning not to simplify to \n because a shell would run the line. So:

payload = note.body.replace(/\r?\n/g, "\x1b\r")

sent with no trailing CR — the user presses Enter. Same rationale as STT sending without one: a note is longer than a dictated sentence, so the chance of wanting an edit before firing is higher, and an unsent prompt is recoverable while a sent one is not.

Two consequences follow from that same comment:

1. Only sessionType === "claude" sessions are offered as targets. bash -l's readline has no binding for \e\r and answers with a bell. Bash tabs are not listed in the picker at all.
2. The sequence lives in one shared helper, not a second "\x1b\r" literal. The knowledge in that comment is hard-won and must not be duplicated away from it.

Target resolution

TerminalSession (lib/types.ts:228-234) already carries projectId, projectName, sessionType and sessionName, so no new plumbing is needed.

Claude sessions for this project	Behavior
0	Button disabled, "no running session for this project"
1	Send
>1	Menu of session display names (Project.renamed_session_names where set)

• The target is pinned at click time, per the hazard useSTT.ts:20,30 guards against (it pins at record-start so text does not land in whatever tab is active at stop time).
• Transport is useTerminal's module-scoped ordered queue (hooks/useTerminal.ts:32-85, exposed as sendInput at :135-141) → terminal_input → exec_manager.send_input. That queue exists because parallel invokes raced the session mutex and reordered keystrokes (useTerminal.ts:7-31); a multi-line note is exactly the payload that would expose it.
• After sending, switch the active tab to that terminal so the user watches it land. This is a courtesy, not a correctness requirement: if it cannot be delivered, the send still succeeded.
• Body only, not the title. The title is an index label for the list, not content.

Explicitly not reused: useProjectActions.ts:104-124's openTerminalWithCommand, which opens a shell then types after a setTimeout(700). Starting a container as a side effect of clicking a note is too large an implicit action, and that timing hack should not spread.

6. Surface — a dock that takes space inward

components/layout/NotesDock.tsx, a flex sibling of the tab panels in App.tsx:139-160, so it is visible over any top-level tab including Terminal. This is the point of the dock: Project Home and Terminal are sibling top-level tabs (layout/MainTabs.tsx), so a Notes-only-as-sub-tab design hides notes exactly when the agent is running.

Opening the dock takes space from inside the window. The terminal narrows and reflows; the OS window is never resized or moved. TerminalView.tsx:643-656 already has a rAF-throttled ResizeObserver that calls fitAddon.fit() then resize(sessionId, cols, rows) → terminal_resize, so narrowing reflows xterm and resizes the container PTY correctly, with no new code.

• Width is drag-resizable, persisted to a triple-c.notes.dock localStorage key. Precedent: triple-c.sidebar.collapsed (store/appState.ts:4-20) is the app's only such key today.
• The dock follows the active tab's project — terminal tab → that session's project, home tab → that project, nothing active → empty state. activeTabKey/tabKeyId plus TerminalSession.projectId already provide this.
• No window geometry code at all. No set_size, no set_position, no monitor work-area arithmetic, no platform checks. §6.1 is why.

6.1 Why the dock does not widen the window — Phase 0 spike

The original design had the dock "expand outward" by widening the OS window, so the terminal kept its size. A throwaway Tauri app (geo-spike) was built and run on the target desktop — KDE Plasma, Wayland session, 2026-09-01 — because the app contains no window-geometry code today and the behavior could not be predicted. It was run twice, once per GDK backend, which turned out to matter more than the platform.

Under XWayland (what every Tauri AppImage gets, because linuxdeploy-plugin-gtk exports GDK_BACKEND=x11 in AppRun, citing tauri-apps/tauri#8541) everything worked:

Test	Result
Grow while floating	asked +420, got +420 — exact
Shrink back	asked -420, got -420 — exact
outer_position()	readable, correct
work_area	3840x2099 — correctly excludes the 61px Plasma panel
Grow while maximized / fullscreen	ignored, as designed

Under native Wayland (what the .deb and .rpm builds get, since they carry no such hook) the same binary failed — and failed silently, which is the part that decided this:

Test	Result
Grow while floating	asked +420, got +600; height moved +276 unrequested
Shrink back	asked -420, got -240; height +276 again
After unmaximize	window reports 5400x2900 on a 4800x2700 monitor
outer_position()	returned Ok(0,0) — for a window that was not at 0,0
Grow while maximized / fullscreen	ignored, as designed
set_position	ignored, as expected

Two independent failures, either one sufficient:

1. Resize compounds. Under Wayland GTK owns the frame and shadows; both outer and inner report a 0x0 decoration, so every read-back is inflated by a fixed offset and every write built on a read-back compounds it. There is no size that can be read and safely written back. Three calls in, the window is larger than the display.
2. Position is a confident lie, not an honest failure. outer_position() returned Ok(0,0) rather than an error. A design that treats "cannot determine position" as "do not grow" never triggers, because the value looks perfectly valid. The room check duly reported slack: 2820px, VERDICT: Grow from a false origin.

The second point is what rules out a runtime fallback. A clean failure could have been handled; a plausible wrong answer cannot be detected from the value itself.

Growing therefore works on one packaging channel and corrupts on another — the split is by packaging, not platform, which is worse than a platform split because two users on identical hardware and OS would see different behavior. A dock that takes space inward behaves identically on every backend, OS and package, needs no detection, and reuses a resize path that is already exercised by every terminal in the app.

Kept as evidence, not as guidance: set_position was honoured under XWayland. The design does not move the window and must not start.

7. Testing

Vitest + jsdom + React Testing Library for the frontend, #[cfg(test)] for Rust, per CLAUDE.md's Testing section.

Rust (notes_store.rs)

• sanitize() rejects traversal and separator characters in a project id
• atomic write leaves no .tmp behind; a crash mid-write leaves the previous file intact
• a corrupt file is moved to .bak and the store opens empty rather than erroring
• removing a project deletes its notes file; a delete failure does not fail removal

Frontend

• send-target resolution at 0 / 1 / N claude sessions, and that bash sessions are excluded
• the newline transform: a multi-line body becomes \x1b\r-joined, with no trailing CR
• the dock's project resolution: terminal tab, home tab, and nothing active
• save-on-blur persists, and dock width round-trips through localStorage

Note the limit TerminalView.tsx's own comment records: jsdom never synthesizes the follow-up keypress, so keyboard-path bugs of that family are invisible to unit tests. The send path is a direct sendInput call rather than a synthetic keystroke, which sidesteps that — but anything touching real key handling needs a manual check in Chromium.

8. Out of scope for v1

• A detached second window for a second monitor. The store boundary in §2 is drawn so it is an additive follow-up: emit notes-changed from the store's write path, and add a second narrowly scoped capability granting the notes window core:event:allow-listen / allow-unlisten — capabilities/default.json scopes those to "windows": ["main"] today, and cross-window sync needs them. Application commands need no ACL entry (CLAUDE.md, Key Conventions), so only the events require it. lib.rs:379-387's main-window-only close handler would need review at that point.
• Syncing notes into the workspace as .md for the agent to read unprompted. There is no generic write-a-file-to-container command today (only write_file_to_container for image paste and upload_bytes_to_container for migration), and a second storage path with a sync direction is a v2 conversation.
• Tags, full-text search, manual reordering, note history.
• Any change to claude_instructions. The two features stay distinct: ambient context versus fired-on-demand items.

9. Open questions

None. The Phase 0 spike settled the surface (§6.1); every other decision is recorded in the table above.