The Plan and the Daily Brief

Updated September 2026

🎯 Purpose

Read the Recommended Plan, understand why an item is where it is, and clear something that has slipped.

📌 Prerequisites

• A Daily Note with something in Focus, Tasks & Next Steps, or Schedule.

🧠 How the order is decided

The plan is grouped, and each group states why it ranks where it does:

1. Starting Soon — begins within the next 30 minutes. This is the one you can still make, so it leads. Like the group below it, it only exists when there is something in it.
2. Missed Commitments — its start time has passed and it is still not ticked off. This group only exists on a day where something was missed.
3. Primary Priorities — your 🧠 Focus for Today lines. On an ordinary day, with nothing imminent and nothing missed, this is the top of your plan.
4. Overdue — tasks past their due date.
5. Next Logical Steps — your 🎯 Tasks & Next Steps lines.
6. Scheduled Commitments — today's timed events, further out than half an hour.
7. System Tasks — tracked tasks due today.
8. Yesterday's Momentum — open loops carried forward.

Each heading appears once. Within a group, order is your note's order — except the three timed groups, which run in clock order: 8am above 11am above 5pm. A commitment walks down that list as the day goes on: it sits in Scheduled Commitments, moves up to Starting Soon half an hour before it begins, and joins Missed Commitments once it has started and you have not ticked it off.

Every timed row shows its time, in the same 12-hour form as the rest of AIOS — 2:00–3:00pm, or 2:30pm where you gave no end. A row with no time shows none; most of the plan has no clock and an empty marker on every line would be noise.

When something counts as missed

Five minutes after it was due to START, not after it ends. If a 9:00–11:00 block is still sitting untouched at 9:06, that is worth knowing at 9:06 — waiting until 11:00 to mention it means telling you at the one moment nothing can be done.

Two consequences worth knowing, because they surprise people:

• A long block will read as missed while it is still running. An 8am–5pm working day shows under Missed Commitments from 8:06am until you tick it off. That is the flag doing its job — it means you have not marked this, not time has passed. Tick it and it goes.
• An all-day event is never missed. It does not start at any particular moment, so there is nothing to be late for.

🪜 Steps — work the plan

1. Tick an item's checkbox to finish it. The note line moves to Work Completed and the editor scrolls to the line itself, not the top of the section.
2. Use ▲ ▼ to reorder. That order is yours and is remembered; AIOS will not re-sort it underneath you.
3. Press ✎ to change an item's wording, or the section it lives in, without leaving the plan. The row becomes a text field and a section picker; SAVE writes both to the note.
4. Next Action above the plan is simply its first item.

🎯 Moving an item to another section

The heading an item sits under in the plan is not a label AIOS put on it — it is where the line is in your note. Focus for Today ranks above Tasks & Next Steps, which ranks above Open Loops, so changing the section is how you promote or park something.

The section picker in the ✎ row offers those three. Choose one and the bullet moves in the note, logged like every other write AIOS makes. Nothing is copied and nothing is deleted: the line leaves one heading and arrives under another, exactly as written.

A timed commitment is not in the list, and that is deliberate. A line in 📆 Schedule carries its time in the words, so moving it somewhere without a Schedule heading would leave the commitment live and the line no longer saying when it is. Change a timed thing from the calendar, where the time is the thing you are editing.

🔄 The plan is worked out FROM your note

Everything in the Recommended Plan is derived from what is written in your Daily Note. Nothing is stored separately, which is why editing the note is how you change the plan — and why the plan has to be looking at the same version of the note that you are.

It refreshes when you arrive at it. On a phone the plan is its own page, so tapping PLAN re-reads the note first. You never tick something that is no longer there.

If it ever says the line has changed, that is exactly what happened: the note moved on after the plan was drawn — usually because you kept typing. The plan refreshes itself and you can tick it again. Nothing is lost and nothing was written.

🪜 Steps — clear something overdue

An item marked [OVERDUE] in the Daily Brief carries two buttons: TODAY and TOMORROW. Pressing one moves the due date. Overdue is derived from the date, so moving the date is the only honest way to clear it — hiding the marker would just have the next Brief contradict you.

This works on a missed event as well as an overdue task: the event moves to that day, and its line moves with it into that day's note. A routine is the one thing it will not move, and it says so — a routine repeats, so there is no single occurrence to reschedule. Change its line in your Core SOP note instead. Anything the button cannot do it says next to the line you pressed, rather than somewhere else on the screen.

An open loop you deliberately carried forward is not marked overdue. Only something with a real clock time is.

📰 The Daily Brief

Reads top to bottom as a briefing: an executive overview, your start date and day count, then counted Events: and Tasks: headings, then the plan with its reasoning.

• EDIT beside Events or Tasks jumps you into today's note at that section, with the cursor placed there. On a phone it changes page first.
• Still open lists commitments older than the lookback window — surfaced so they cannot go quiet, never silently rewritten into today.

📡 Headlines, on the Brief and in their own panel

AIOS reads your notes and asks a model; neither of those knows what happened this morning. The NEWS button — beside CALENDAR — is the answer to that: one scrolling list of AI, cyber-security and world headlines, newest first, each one a link to the publisher.

The Brief carries a short version at the top under My News: at most five headlines you have not dealt with yet, newest first, with the count of everything still waiting beside the heading. The arrow folds them away. MY NEWS and ALL NEWS both open the full panel, on the view they name.

✓ DONE and ✕ HIDE

Every headline, on the Brief and in the panel, carries two buttons. They do different things on purpose.

The Links line is there so you can find the article again or show it to somebody — it is an ordinary markdown link in your own note, so it renders as a real link in the editor and you can delete it like any other line.

Pressing DONE twice — on two devices, or because you did not see the first press land — writes the note once. The second press says so.

ALL NEWS is the way back. It shows everything, including what you have read and hidden, each marked READ or HIDDEN with an UNDO beside it. Undo puts the headline back in My News; it does not remove what a DONE already wrote into your note, because that is a record of something that really happened.

Anything you have not read in 14 days leaves My News on its own. It is not deleted and nothing is marked — it is simply old news, and it is still in ALL NEWS if you want it. The panel says how many went that way, because a headline that vanishes silently is indistinguishable from one that was never fetched.

When there is nothing left, the block says Caught up rather than disappearing — being finished and the feed being down are different things and should not look the same.

Press SOURCES to choose who you read. Every source is labelled:

• SOURCE — the people the story happens to. A vendor's own blog, a CISA advisory. Slower, never wrong about what was announced.
• REPORTING — outlets that find the story and chase it. Faster, and where a breach or a launch usually surfaces first.

You can add your own feed at the bottom of that list: a name, the feed's URL, and which list it belongs in. AIOS fetches it before saving it and shows you its latest headline, so you can see it worked — if you give a page's address rather than its feed, it says so instead of saving something that would quietly show nothing. Feeds you added carry a ✕; the built-in ones are unticked rather than deleted.

Nothing here calls an AI model. These are the publishers' own words and their own links, which is the point — a model asked what happened today either answers from last year or paraphrases a headline it might have invented.

🤝 Handing today's tasks to Claude Code

GENERATE PROMPT, at the bottom right of the prompt box beside CLAUDE CODE, opens one dialog with two ways in. Both end in the same editable box.

It takes the room it has. On a desktop the dialog is nearly the full height of the window, and in BUILD FROM SCRATCH the form sits on the left with the finished prompt beside it on the right, each scrolling on its own — so you can change a field and watch the prompt change without scrolling past ten questions to find it. BUILD PROMPT stays at the foot of the form wherever you are in it. On a phone it is the whole screen, as it has been.

TODAY'S TASKS joins two things you already wrote: your standing instructions, and everything currently under 🎯 Tasks & Next Steps in today's note.

• It opens a box you can read and edit before you copy. What is copied is what is in the box, so a change you make there is a change that goes out.
• EDIT PRESET opens the note holding your standing instructions (aios-handoff-preset, in SOPs). Rewrite it however you like — AIOS creates it once and never touches it again. Only the part below the last --- is sent; everything above it is explanation for you.
• The first line of the shipped preset is the one to make yours. It says to read MasterContext.md at the root of your project and create it if it is not there — a single file the assistant reads first and keeps current, so a new session starts knowing what the last one decided. If your project already keeps that somewhere else, put that name in instead. The rest of the preset is about how a session should be run and is worth keeping either way.
• REBUILD re-reads today's note, for when you have added a task since you opened the box.
• COPY & OPEN CLAUDE CODE copies the prompt and opens Claude Code in a new tab. It cannot start a session for you — AIOS runs on a server and Claude Code runs on your machine — so paste it in yourself.

BUILD FROM SCRATCH is for a prompt about anything else. It asks for the four things that make any prompt specific, and assembles them into a sentence:

• Angle — who is answering, and what they specialise in. Two roles is better than one: a primary for the judgement, a secondary for the craft. The greyed suggestions are examples, not defaults — type your own.
• Context — who it is for, and what they are dealing with.
• Task — what to produce, and about what.
• Style — the tone, and what it should achieve.

Fill in what you know and leave the rest; a half-filled form still produces a clean sentence. SAVE AS NOTE keeps the prompt and the fields it was built from in your notes, so changing one word later does not mean starting over.

No AI request is spent on either mode. Both are your own words joined together.

📴 With no connection

Both panels keep the last version AIOS worked out, with a line above them saying when — and, if you have written since, saying that your latest edits are not in it yet. They are worked out on the server from your whole vault, so what you are reading offline is genuinely the last one it managed, not a fresh one.

Only a device that has never been online long enough says nothing at all, because there is genuinely nothing to show yet.

See Your Phone, Your Settings for the whole offline picture.

🔍 How to verify

1. Put a line under 🧠 Focus for Today and save. It is at the top of the plan under Primary Priorities.
2. Add a Schedule line for a time that started more than five minutes ago. A Missed Commitments group appears above your focus, and the row shows the time.
3. Tick it. The group disappears and the line is in Work Completed.
4. Add a Schedule line for twenty minutes from now. A Starting Soon group appears above everything, including Missed Commitments.
5. Press EDIT beside Tasks in the Brief. The editor lands on that section.
6. Press GENERATE PROMPT. The box holds your preset followed by every line under Tasks & Next Steps, as bullets, and says how many it found.
7. Switch to BUILD FROM SCRATCH, type a role and a topic and nothing else, and press BUILD PROMPT. It reads as one clean sentence, not a template with gaps in it.

🚨 When it does not work

📖 Related

AIOS Basics: The Daily Note, Scheduling and the Calendar

See what AIOS is All guides