Work status

One question follows an owner around all day: what is Morna doing right now? The shell answers it in one place, with one vocabulary, in the top bar. It is not a feed and not a spinner — it is four states, and which one you are in is decided by a pure function with no access to anything but three facts.

Four states

The priority order is the whole design, and it is deliberate: needs-you beats working beats blocked beats done — except that a lost connection preempts everything, because a surface that cannot see the truth must not report a comfortable one. Flip between them here; each carries a trigger label, a headline and a detail line, all three from the same resolver.

The resolver is a pure function

deriveWorkStatus() takes three facts and returns the whole view — attention state, trigger label, headline, detail. No component decides its own wording, so the top bar, the drawer and any future surface resolve the same vocabulary from the same input and cannot drift apart. It is also, being pure, the piece that is actually tested.

export function deriveWorkStatus(args: {
  needsYou: number;
  hasFreshWork: boolean;                       // an event inside the last 18s
  connection: "connected" | "reconnecting" | "lost";
}): WorkStatusView

// the order is the doctrine:
//   connection === "lost"        → "blocked"    — a broken line never looks quiet
//   needsYou > 0                 → "needs-you"  — your decision is never buried
//   hasFreshWork || reconnecting → "working"
//   otherwise                    → "done"       — "On watch", not "Idle"

Sol’s brief

The trigger opens a small Drawer — a review beside the work, per the interruption doctrine — holding three lanes: Needs you, Recorded plan, and Recently landed. Each lane has its own count, its own empty sentence, and its own loading sentence, and every one of those sentences is written to state an absence rather than imply a zero: “No owner decision is recorded in the current queue”, “No active plan step is recorded”.

The header is the most interesting part, because of what it refuses to do. It shows the current goal and the active plan step — and then says, in the surface itself: “Source, strategy, authority, and outcome evidence are not recorded in this brief yet.” The API does not return that lineage, so the drawer names the gap instead of assembling a causal story out of whatever data happens to be nearby. That sentence is the design, not a placeholder.

Work trace

WorkTrace is the shipped primitive for the lineage the brief cannot yet show — five glanceable stages answering what changed, why this work was chosen, what is moving, whether the owner is needed, and how success will be witnessed. The rail is always visible; the basis behind each stage is progressive disclosure behind one honest toggle (“Why this work” / “Hide basis”).