Feature Waves

Wave 6 — Modes

A two-axis context model — activity-state x hat — resolved at the edge, changing Mallory's context, never his character.

Dated 2026-06-15Programme Feature Waves

Situation

Mallory had no notion of what Alex is doing right now, so he reliably got things wrong: surfacing work Slack mentions in the evening, dumping walls of text while he's commuting, framing everything around the wrong project/calendar, or staying in work-briefing register at weekends.

The first of three Wave 6 sub-tracks (Modes → Device signals → Live lookups). The guiding principle: modes change his context, not his character — he stays himself and simply knows what Alex is doing, the way a good aide who knows you're in the car still talks like themselves.

Key decisions

Two axes, deliberately small

Activity-state (Commuting / Working / Off) x Hat (Maths Circle / MK Community Energy / Personal) — a 3x3 space; meetings and weekends are not separate states, just routine defaults.

Resolver priority

resolveMode() is a pure function: manual override (unexpired) → mode hint (fresh, Hub-pushed) → routine default (config constant) — the later device-signals track slots in as another hint with no rework.

Override auto-expiry

A manual override expires at the next routine boundary so Alex never gets stuck in a stale mode overnight.

Category-gate matrix (Effect A)

Mode maps each nudge category to interrupt/batch/defer; high priority always breaks through, low never interrupts — mode only governs the normal tier.

Context line, not persona rewrite (Effect B)

Mode injects one context line into the context block ("Alex is commuting… wearing his MK hat"); Commuting adds only a soft voice-first lean, not a hard rule.

Hat-bias in recall is soft (Effect D)

The current hat weights Wave 5's recall ranking but is never a hard filter — he still crosses hats when asked.

Architecture

A new KV namespace outside KNOWN_SIGNALS holding override/hint state, resolved by a pure core that every consumer (nudges, context, recall, briefing) reads from.

mode:override / mode:hint (KV)

Own namespace to avoid entangling the capability drift-guard; override set by the UI, hint pushed inbound by the Hub (calendar-derived).

resolveMode() (pure, unit-tested)

Priority order, override expiry, routine table — the shared core every consumer reads.

POST /mode / GET /mode

Access-gated set/read of the manual override and resolved mode; GET also serves the Hub's briefing poll.

Hat→sources map (Hub-side)

Maps each hat to its calendar/Slack/Gmail/Asana/vault area; the Hub stamps hat on each nudge so the edge trusts the tag rather than re-deriving it.

StatusSheet (E1)

Now leads with the current mode and a flip control for both axes, above operating-status detail; no new header chrome, plus a quiet mode line in the in-feed brief.

Risks & guardrails

Stuck-in-mode after manual override

Mitigated by auto-expiry at the next routine boundary — overrides never persist past their natural window.

Deferred nudges never resurface

v1 has no timed re-delivery for defer — a deferred work nudge simply waits in Updates and folds into the next morning briefing; explicitly out of scope for v1.

MK Community Energy hat is dormant

Config is present but lights up with no code change only once its Google account/calendar are connected — not yet live.

Meeting-volume reshuffle re-homed

The valuable EOD reflection ("heavy meeting day, X/Y/Z slipped") is deferred as a write-action fast-follow; v1 only leaves a clean EOD hook.

Delivery

Phase 1 — Mode core & stores

Pure mode core (src/lib/mode.ts); hat path-classifier (src/lib/hats.ts); mode KV store (src/mode.ts); mode routes (src/routes/mode.ts).

Phase 2 — Effect A: mode-gated nudges

Add hat to the nudge payload/row/migration; apply the mode gate in handleNudge.

Phase 3 — Effect B: per-turn context line

Inject modeContextLine into the chat context.

Phase 4 — Effect D: recall hat-bias

Soft hat-weight in ranking.

Phase 5 — Effect E1: web UI

loadMode/setMode API client; StatusSheet mode section + wiring.

Phase 6 — Verification

Full test sweep + browser verify.

Out of scope

Commuting "think-about" digest (a whole new voice-first batch pipeline + settings)Meeting-volume reshuffle reasoning + its write-back actionTimed re-delivery of deferred nudgesIn-app routine-schedule editorE2 menu/capability reordering per mode (re-homed to the R&D surface track)Automatic activity detection (the Device-signals track, which slots in as another resolveMode() hint)

spec · docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-15-wave-6-modes-design.md
plan · docs/superpowers/plans/2026-06-15-wave-6-modes.md

Mallory · Estate briefing