How State Works

Starting State builds the first trustworthy project picture.

A new user-created project begins in Baseline Setup. A person can add existing project material or enter what they already know, and State uses that material to propose a Starting State through the normal Evidence and Review flow. During setup, the AI looks for broad baseline coverage while unresolved unknowns stay Questions.

During setup, State tries to preserve useful source structure, group durable facts into a small set of sensible areas and topics, and split independently maintainable facts instead of collapsing a whole document into one summary. Large sources can be interpreted in bounded pieces while the original Evidence remains intact. Setup can finish only after pending Reviews are resolved and failed or unfinished Evidence is cleared, then a person explicitly finishes the baseline.

Preserved input, not automatically truth.

Evidence is the preserved record of what came in. It may come from a manual Note, a supported uploaded document, or an approved Slack channel. Once created, it's immutable, and a correction becomes new Evidence rather than rewriting the old record.

Evidence isn't automatically treated as true. If State initially decides it does not need a Review, a person can ask State to reconsider it. Reconsideration reruns interpretation and may surface a Review.

The decision boundary between interpretation and authority.

State creates a Review when new Evidence looks consequential. Depending on the situation, a Review may propose changing Current State, creating or resolving a Question, or leaving Current State unchanged. The person reviewing it can:

• Update Current State: accept the proposed change.
• Adjust, then update: change the wording before authorizing it.
• Leave Current State unchanged: preserve the Evidence without changing the maintained truth.
• Keep tracking uncertainty: create or link a Question instead of changing State.
• Create a Question: authorize a suggested Question.
• Dismiss: resolve the Review without applying the proposed outcome.

Pending proposals can also go stale or get superseded. A proposal is stale when its target State item has changed since interpretation, and accepting it is blocked. A proposal is superseded when newer Evidence updates the same Review and target with a replacement, so the older pending version is dropped in favor of the new one, not left open alongside it. Multiple proposals bundled into one Review are currently decided together, not one at a time.

Tracking what isn't known yet, not what's wrong.

Questions track known unknowns. They start open and can also be marked blocking, when the uncertainty should stop related work from moving forward.

Reviewed Evidence can resolve a Question without changing Current State. A flagged uncertainty about an existing fact can instead create or link a Question when that uncertainty should stay visible rather than be resolved outright. Questions can also be stopped manually when they're no longer worth tracking. To avoid duplicates, State compares a new Question's normalized text for an exact match against open Questions; it does not use fuzzy or semantic matching.

One caveat worth knowing: if a person materially changes the proposed wording before accepting it, any Question that Evidence was meant to answer stays open rather than being treated as silently resolved.