How to add an entry to a digital garden without ever facing a blank, well-formatted page, and why it's fine to let a language model do the sorting.
"the espresso machine's descaling smell is exactly the greenhouse at the botanical garden in january. why."
The espresso machine's descaling cycle smells exactly like the botanical garden's greenhouse in January. Worth tracing why. See [[scent-and-memory]].
the model sorted this one. the sentence is still entirely yours.
Most digital gardens fail at the inbox, not the notes folder. When an entry requires a title, a type, a symbol, and a set of links before it's allowed to exist, most thoughts simply stop getting written down.
So the inbox asks for nothing. Open src/inbox/, dump the thought exactly as it arrived, no
frontmatter, no heading, no tidy sentence, and commit. That's the entire daily minimum. A cutting
doesn't need formatting yet. It just needs to be saved before you forget it.
This is lifted straight from the garden's own instructions file, the version every contributor reads before touching the inbox.
## How to add an entry The idea of the daily minimum contribution is to open `src/inbox/`, dump a thought with no frontmatter or formatting and commit. To publish properly: classify the fragment's `type`, assign a `symbol` from the taxonomy, write proper frontmatter, add `[[wikilinks]]` to anything that already exists as a note, and move it to `src/notes/<slug>.md`, then clear it out of the inbox. See `CLAUDE.md` for the fuller sorting info.
Publishing means picking a type and stamping it with a symbol. The
set below is a starting system, small enough to hold in your head, specific enough to mean something
when you scan a hundred notes at once.
Everything between "dump a thought" and "clear the inbox" is organizing work: reading the
fragment, comparing it to everything already in src/notes/, choosing a type,
picking a symbol, drafting frontmatter, finding the [[wikilinks]] that already
exist. None of it is writing. All of it is sorting.
That's exactly the work a model that's read your whole archive is good at, and exactly the work most people quietly stop doing once the inbox gets past thirty entries. Handing it off isn't a compromise on the practice, it's what keeps the practice alive past week three.
The cutting stays yours. The card is just where it gets stored.
The line that matters: a model never writes what goes in src/inbox/. It only helps move an
already-written thought into src/notes/, the classifying, the stamping, the linking. Your
sentence, dumped at 6:41am with no punctuation to spare, arrives on the card exactly as you wrote it.
The complete sorting logic, every edge case in the taxonomy, slug conventions, what happens when a
fragment fits two types at once, lives in CLAUDE.md at the root of the repo. Read this
page for the shape of the method. Read that file before you touch anything with real edge cases.