The problem
A task that isn’t urgent can quietly slip when it only lives in a chat thread. And checking status the obvious way, my phone, risks derailing into everything else waiting there. I wanted “what’s next” to have a real answer without opening it.
The approach
One living board file gets read and updated every time the skill runs. State lives in a file, not a transcript that eventually scrolls out of reach.
How it works
- Triggers on natural phrasing (“what’s next,” “where am I”), not only when named directly
- Reads the board first to get real status before saying anything
- Updates task markers as things move
- Appends a dated log entry instead of editing over the old one
- The published skeleton documents structure and rules only; my real task board, with my actual info, stays private
Design decisions
- One source of truth, never overwritten: a change adds a new entry rather than erasing the old one, so the board doubles as a record of how a task actually moved, not just its current state
- Because state lives in the file, not the chat, the assistant behaves like the same teammate across conversations that share no history
What this demonstrates
A reusable tool with encoded judgment, not a to-do list wrapper: a single source of truth and an audit trail that survives across sessions.
