Day to day

Published 27/10/2026

The commands you reach for once a project is running. Every one has --help.

The board#

ade card add "title" --path src/x.py --done "what finished looks like"
ade card list
ade cockpit                 # every open card, its state and next command, decisions due, budgets

Questions and decisions#

Some things only a person should decide. ade decide records them with a recommendation, a default and a deadline, so work never waits forever on an answer:

ade decide --ask "which store?" --rec sqlite --default jsonl --by 7d
ade decide --queue          # open questions, nearest deadline first; the default applies when it passes

A decision can also be a standing ruling attached to paths, which every agent editing those paths is told about.

Observations#

ade observe writes down how something actually behaved, with a date to check it again, so nothing quietly goes stale:

ade observe "nightly backup" "finished in 4 minutes" --recheck 30d

Watching and waiting#

ade watch c3                # follow a card's lane log live
ade wait clean --bound 30m  # exit 0 when the condition holds, 4 when the bound passes, 5 if a lane went quiet
ade session list            # detached runs, live or ended

ade wait is made for running in the background: Claude Code tells the session when it ends, so an agent can wait without spending turns on polling.

Big output#

Long test runs and logs are the quickest way to fill an agent's context. Run them through ADE's output store:

ade q run -- npm test       # you see the head, the tail and the errors; the rest is kept
ade q show q17 --page 2
ade q grep q17 "TypeError"
ade q sql "SELECT path FROM files WHERE test = 0"   # read-only queries over outputs, records and the graph

Usage#

ade telemetry               # tokens, cost and time per card and per engine
ade telemetry export        # OpenTelemetry-shaped files in .ade/telemetry/, on your machine
ade status --line           # the one-line status Claude Code shows

Set [usage] share in ade.toml to the part of each account's week you want ADE to use; the cockpit shows each engine's meter against it, and the conductor parks work instead of waking a model when an engine is over.

Orca, if you use it#

Orca is an optional desktop and phone app. With [cockpit] mode = "orca" in ade.toml, each lane opens as an Orca worktree with a terminal, stops show up as the worktree's status, and the app carries alerts to your phone. mode = "auto" uses Orca whenever it is running and the terminal alone when it is not, and ade cockpit --mode orca opens the board there for one run. Everything still works from the terminal without it.