Talking to AIOS

Updated September 2026

🎯 Purpose

Use the prompt box to capture, finish, move and ask — and know which of those happen instantly without costing a model call.

What needs a paid plan: only the asking. Capturing, finishing, moving, rescheduling and reordering all run without a model and work on every plan. On a free plan a question comes back as one line saying answers need a paid plan, and anything the same message already did is already in your note.

📌 Prerequisites

• A Daily Note open (any note works; the open note is sent as context).

🧠 How AIOS decides what you meant

AIOS reads your sentence with parsers, not a model. If it recognises the intent, it does the thing immediately and tells you what it did. The model is only called when AIOS genuinely cannot tell. That is why these are instant and free, and why AIOS never claims to have done something it did not do.

Nothing you ask AIOS to DO costs an AI request. Finishing something, adding a task, moving a line, reordering, scheduling — all handled by AIOS itself. Your daily AI allowance is spent only on things AIOS cannot work out: questions, and open-ended requests.

A sentence that does both still asks the AI. "Finished the report. What should I do next?" files the completion AND asks the question, so it costs one request — because the question deserves an answer and dropping it silently would be worse than spending one.

🪜 Steps — capture something

Dates it understands: today, tomorrow, on Monday, 8/21/2026, 8/21, August 21, Aug 21st, 2026. Slash dates are month first. A year you leave off resolves forwards, never into the past.

🪜 Steps — schedule several things at once

You do not have to say them one at a time.

Put them all in one message. Separate them however you naturally would — a comma, an "and", or one per line:

Dentist tomorrow at 2pm and gym on Thursday at 6am

Call the plumber Friday 2pm, wash clothes tomorrow 12:15pm, bins out every Tuesday 8am

- Pick up a prescription tomorrow 9:30am
      - MOT booking on 9/3 at 11am
      - Water the plants every weekend

Each one becomes its own commitment, on its own day, with its own name — and AIOS lists every one of them back to you so you can check.

AIOS only splits a sentence when splitting finds MORE than not splitting. That is why Lunch with Sam and Dana at 1pm stays one lunch: the "and" joins two people, not two commitments, so it is left alone.

Or write them in a note and point at the note. Type your list into any note, then say:

Schedule all of this for me

Anything AIOS can read a day or a time from is scheduled. Anything it cannot, it names back to you and leaves alone — a heading, a reminder to yourself, a line with no date. Nothing in your note is moved, rewritten or deleted; AIOS only reads it.

This needs the note to be open — it schedules what is on your screen, and with nothing open there is nothing to point at.

🪜 Steps — finish something

Type any of: finished the client call, done with the invoice, completed the roof inspection.

AIOS matches what you said against your open commitments and needs to be reasonably sure. If it is not sure, it does nothing rather than finishing the wrong thing — say it again with more of the original wording.

🪜 Steps — rearrange

• move the budget review to the top
• put the proposal in focus

🪜 Steps — move something to another day

• move Wash clothes to tomorrow
• reschedule the dentist to 8/21
• push standup to friday

move, reschedule, push, shift and bump all work, and the day can be today, tomorrow, a weekday, or a date. It moves the commitment you already have — it never creates a second one.

You can name the thing however you refer to it: move the event 12:05-1:05pm Wash clothes to tomorrow finds the same commitment as move Wash clothes to tomorrow. If AIOS cannot find what you named, it says so and changes nothing rather than moving something that is nearly right.

move it to tomorrow is refused on purpose — "it" does not say which commitment, and picking the last one would be a guess.

🪜 Steps — ask a question

Anything that is a question is answered, never captured: what should I focus on today?, anything new today?, how many tasks are open?

🤖 Steps — choose which model answers

Needs a paid plan. The row is not drawn on a free account, because choosing who answers is only meaningful once a question can be answered at all.

At the bottom of the prompt box there is a row of buttons — one for AIOS and one for each AI model: Claude, Gemini, GPT and Grok, each in its own company's colour.

A model with no API key is still shown, dimmed and dashed. Pressing it tells you it is not configured rather than doing nothing, and AIOS answers instead. That is deliberate: a row that only listed the models that happened to be wired would never tell you what wiring another one would buy.

AIOS is the default and it is a real choice, not "none". Left on AIOS, a question is drafted by a cheap model, checked, and escalated to a stronger one only when the answer needs it. That is almost always what you want: it is the fastest and the cheapest, and it is the only setting that can change its mind halfway through.

Pressing a model's name sends your next question straight to that model. One call, one answer, no escalation — because you asked for that one. It stays selected until you change it, on this device.

You can say it instead of pressing it. Hey Claude, what am I missing here? goes to Claude. Hey Gemini, Hey GPT and Hey Grok do the same, and Hey AIOS puts it back to the default for that question. The greeting is required: "Gemini" on its own is a star sign and "grok" is an ordinary verb, so AIOS will not read either as an instruction.

If the two disagree, the button wins. A pressed button is a choice you can see; a greeting is a phrase you may have typed without meaning it as one.

Whichever answers, it answers as AIOS. It still sees your notes, your day and the context you chose — the only thing that changes is which company's model does the thinking. The line under the row says who it was, and so does the note the answer is written into, so "which of them told me that?" is answerable tomorrow.

A button is only drawn for a model this deployment can actually reach. If you name one that is not configured, AIOS answers anyway and tells you plainly that it did — you never get a silent substitution.

🔎 When AIOS does not recognise what you typed

On the free plan the prompt box is also a search box. Type anything AIOS cannot act on and it will say so, then search the web for it in a new tab — you do not have to go and find the search bar.

It tells you which of the two happened before it does anything. I DO NOT KNOW THAT ONE... means the sentence matched none of the commands above, so if you MEANT it as a command, come back to this SOP and check the phrasing — the wordings that work are all listed here. SEARCHING THE WEB... is what it does about it.

It searches with whichever engine you chose beside the search bar in Quick Links (Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage or Brave). Changing it there changes it here too — there is only one setting.

Nothing you asked for is lost. If AIOS did understand part of what you typed — a capture, a completion, a reschedule — it does that and does NOT search: the answer you got is the answer.

If your browser blocks the new tab, the notebook line says so and offers a link you can click.

⚖️ How AIOS decides how hard to work on an answer

Before anything is sent anywhere, AIOS reads what kind of question you asked. That decision is made by AIOS itself — no model is consulted about whether to consult a model — and it decides how much work the answer is worth.

Most of what you type takes the first two rows, and that is the point: checking everything twice would be slower, dearer and no more accurate about questions whose answer was never in doubt.

Sources, and what the footnote actually means

When an answer was checked against live sources, the pages are listed under it, and the ones that are a vendor's own documentation, a government site or a standards body are shown in bold and counted.

If nothing came back, it says so. An answer that was supposed to be checked and was not is the thing worth telling you about, so instead of a silent gap you get a line saying the answer is from the model's own training and may be out of date.

What this cannot promise: AIOS can require that sources exist and can name them. It cannot choose which pages a model reads. Weigh the answer against the sources listed — that is what they are there for.

💬 Working in one window

The answer is written into the note you have open, under a heading called 💬 Working with AIOS at the bottom of it. Whatever the note is — a daily note, an SOP, an article draft, anything. AIOS no longer opens a separate log and takes you away from what you were writing.

That is what makes it worth using while you draft something: ask, read the answer, edit the note, ask again. The note is also what gets sent to AIOS each turn, so the conversation you keep in it is the conversation it keeps seeing — and deleting a paragraph is how you stop it being sent. Prune the section whenever it stops earning its place; deleting the whole heading leaves the note exactly as it was.

Nothing in that section reaches your plan. AIOS's answers are full of bullet points and none of them become tasks — only the sections you write in do that.

🔍 How to verify

• A capture answers immediately with a sentence naming what and which day.
• A capture for today scrolls your note to the line it just wrote.
• A capture for a future day opens the calendar on that day instead — because nothing was written into today's note, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.
• Every turn appends one line to the note's System Log.
• Ask a question with any note open. The exchange appears at the bottom of that note, under 💬 Working with AIOS — and no new note is created.
• Delete that heading and everything under it. Nothing else in the note changes, and the next question starts the section again.

✍️ How much does the wording matter

Less than it used to, and it is meant to matter as little as possible. All of these work:

• Wash clothes tomorrow 12:15pm — and ... tomorrow at 12:15pm
• lunch with Sam tomorrow 1pm-2pm — and ... from 1pm to 2pm
• Work: ApartmentSEO every weekday 8am-5pm — and 8am til 5pm, and every weekday from 8am to 5pm Work: ApartmentSEO with the cadence in front
• Standup at 9am every day — the time may come before the cadence
• Mow the lawn every weekend 9am
• Submit expenses on 20th every month at 8am — and on the 20th of every month
• Coffee with Dana next Tuesday at 11am — next, this, by, for and from all introduce a day, not just on
• Submit the tax return by Friday
• Book club Tuesday 7pm — a bare weekday counts as a day when a time follows it
• Pick up the kids at 3:15pm today — the day may come after the time
• Lunch with Sam Friday 12-1pm — a range can carry its am/pm once, on the end

If a plain-English sentence is not understood, that is a bug in AIOS, not a mistake by you. Say so and it gets widened.

The name AIOS keeps is the name without the joinery. Prep the deck for tomorrow is filed as Prep the deck, not "Prep the deck for" — the words that only existed to attach the day are dropped, and words that are part of the name are not (Log in tomorrow stays Log in). If a sentence names nothing once the day is taken out of it — for tomorrow on its own — nothing is captured, because a commitment with no name is one you can see and cannot act on.

The asking is not the name either. can you schedule a haircut for Saturday at 10am? is filed as haircut, not "can you schedule a haircut", and remind me to call the bank tomorrow is filed as call the bank. The polite wrapping comes off; the thing you asked for stays.

Asking AIOS for something is not scheduling something. Give me one idea for tomorrow and tell me what is on tomorrow are answered, not captured — they are questions with the question mark left off. remind me to call the bank tomorrow is still a commitment and is still captured; only remind me what/when/where... counts as asking.

A repeating item can state a whole span. every weekday 8am-5pm is a routine that runs 8am to 5pm — both ends reach the calendar, the routine line in your Core SOP note, and the Schedule section of each day it lands on. It used to keep only the start, which is why an all-day routine showed up as half an hour.

One thing is deliberate rather than missing: a bare number is not a time, so Empty 5 buckets tomorrow is a task for tomorrow and not an 05:00 event.

A time on both sides of the cadence is refused rather than half-read. Work: ApartmentSEO til 5pm every weekday 8am puts one end before the cadence and the other after it, and AIOS asks rather than guessing which is which — because the alternative is a commitment named "Work: ApartmentSEO til 5pm", and a name with a time in it goes wrong quietly for a long time afterwards.

❗ When a turn fails

AIOS writes a line into today's System Log saying what you asked and why it did not work, and jumps you to it. It does not make a chat note for a conversation that never happened.

The reason is specific — the model's limit was reached, the key was rejected, the model was unavailable — because those need different things from you. Nothing you asked for is half-done when a turn fails.

If the question was going into a note's 💬 Working with AIOS section, your question stays there and the answer slot says it was not answered and why. It is never left saying AIOS is still thinking.

🚨 When it does not work

📖 Related

Scheduling and the Calendar, The Plan and the Daily Brief, What AIOS Can See

See what AIOS is All guides