Writing SOPs and Articles

Updated September 2026

🎯 Purpose

Turn a note you already wrote into a reusable procedure of your own — and know what can ever leave your vault.

GENERATE SOP needs a paid plan. It asks a model to do the writing, so it is part of the assistant.

CREATE ARTICLE needs a paid plan too, for the same reason. What it writes is a note in your own notebook — publishing one to the public Developer's Notebook is still the owner's, and everyone else gets SUBMIT FOR REVIEW in the same place.

📌 Prerequisites

• A note with something real in it. Both buttons work from the note you have open.
• GENERATE SOP and CREATE ARTICLE both need a paid plan. Publishing to the public Notebook is the owner's either way; exporting your own webpage is not.

🪜 Steps — generate an SOP

1. Open the note the procedure should come from.
2. Press GENERATE SOP. It types a sentence into the prompt box and submits it, so you can see exactly what was asked — and type it yourself next time.
3. AIOS writes a new note in your SOPs category. Your source note is never rewritten; it only gains one System Log line saying an SOP was drafted from it.
4. Edit the result. It is your note.

The SOP is asked for by section: purpose, prerequisites, ordered steps, how to verify, and what to do when it fails. Verification is required — a procedure you cannot tell has failed is not one.

Your SOPs are yours. Nothing in your vault becomes public because it exists — it becomes public only if you send it in and the owner publishes it.

🧾 If you have nothing to write up yet

Press the button anyway. If the note you have open is not a source — your daily note, an SOP AIOS already wrote, an empty note, or no note at all — AIOS opens an intake form instead of drafting something about nothing:

• sop-intake — what the procedure is for, who runs it, what they need first, the steps in order, how to tell it worked, and what goes wrong.
• article-intake — the problem, what you tried that did not work, what did, and why it worked.

Both leave places to paste screenshots: drop an image into the note and AIOS writes the image token where your cursor is. Fill in what you can — blank sections are fine — then press the same button again with the form open. What AIOS will not do is invent the part you left out, because an invented step in a procedure is somebody running a wrong command on a live system.

The form is an ordinary note in your Notes. Edit it, keep it, or delete it.

You always get a blank one. If the form you have is untouched, that is the one you get back. The moment you type into it, it is your draft — it stays in Notes exactly as you left it, and the next time you press the button without a source you get a fresh form beside it. Your half-finished one is never overwritten and you are never dropped into last week's.

Finish a form and press the button again with it open: that is when the procedure is written, into your SOPs.

🪜 Steps — write an article

1. Open the note the article should come from.
2. Press CREATE ARTICLE. Like GENERATE SOP, it types a sentence into the prompt box and submits it, so you can see what was asked.
3. AIOS drafts the article into a new note. Your source note is never rewritten; it gains one System Log line saying an article was drafted from it.
4. Edit it. It is your note.

🌐 Steps — turn it into a webpage you own

This is the one that does not go through anybody. Press ⬇ WEBPAGE on an SOP or an article and you get one self-contained HTML file — the styling and any pictures from the note are inside it, so it works uploaded to your own server and it works opened from a folder on a laptop with no internet at all.

Nothing is published anywhere and nothing is sent to us. It is a download.

What you can change before you download it:

PREVIEW opens it in a new tab exactly as a browser will open the file. DOWNLOAD THE PAGE saves it.

Screenshots come with it, and you add them to the NOTE. Drop an image into the note (or press IMAGE in the editor) and it goes where your cursor is; every picture in the note is then embedded in the exported file itself rather than linked, which is what makes the file work on a server, on a memory stick and in an email. There is deliberately no second place to keep pictures: one of them would go stale the first time you edited the other.

If a picture is too large to include, the dialog says so and names it — it is never quietly left out, because a procedure missing its step-three screenshot is a procedure somebody cannot follow.

📨 Steps — send an SOP to whoever approves one

On an SOP, the same dialog has a Send for approval section.

1. Put the address that manages procedures where you work into the field and press SAVE ADDRESS. That is the account's setting; you only do it once.
2. Write anything the reviewer should know (optional).
3. Press SEND FOR APPROVAL.

AIOS emails the procedure there and sets the reply address to yours, so whoever reviews it can send changes straight back to you by replying. The note gains one System Log line saying where it went and when.

This is not SUBMIT TO COMMUNITY. That one offers a procedure to Caligo Arts for the public Notebook. This one sends it inside your own organisation and goes nowhere near us. They are separate buttons with different words for exactly that reason.

🪜 Steps — submit for review

Press SUBMIT FOR REVIEW on an article, or SUBMIT TO COMMUNITY on an SOP. Both do the same thing: they put a copy of what the note says into the owner's review queue. (On a phone, SUBMIT TO COMMUNITY appears on the row with the note's name rather than in the header, so it never crowds out the Notebook menu.)

It asks first. A dialog says what sending it in means, how much of today's allowance is left, and where to write if you send something by mistake. Nothing leaves your notebook until you press the button in that dialog.

What the limits are. One article and one SOP a day. The count is by NOTE, not by press, so fixing a typo and sending the same note again is free. A submission needs at least 50 words, so there is something to read.

You can take it back. While it is still waiting, pressing the same button offers TAKE IT BACK instead — it leaves the queue, your note is untouched, and it cannot be published afterwards. It does not give you back the day's allowance, but you can send that same note in again once it is ready. If something has already been published, email the address in the dialog and it will be removed.

• It saves first, so what is sent is what you can see.
• It is a copy. Editing the note afterwards does not change what was sent — what the owner reads is the version you agreed to. Submit again to replace it; that replaces your pending entry rather than queueing a second one.
• Every failure path tells you your note is safe in your notebook. The whole point of the feature is not to lose your words.
• A private note cannot be submitted, and neither can one that merely mentions a private note by name. You are told, so you can reword the line — nothing is quietly removed for you.

If the owner publishes it, it appears in the Developer's Notebook under Community Submitted, with your name on it.

🌐 Who can publish

Only the owner. If you are an administrator you see PUBLISH; everyone else sees SUBMIT FOR REVIEW in the same place, because a button that is drawn for you and then refused is worse than no button.

Two human gates in series either way: somebody reads the draft and decides, and the owner reads the diff and pushes. Nothing reaches the internet without both.

🔍 How to verify

1. Press GENERATE SOP on a note with a few steps in it.
2. A new note appears under SOPs — and your original is byte-for-byte the same apart from one System Log line.
3. The new note's frontmatter says sop: true. An article is flagged with the article key instead, which is what makes the two impossible to confuse.
4. Press SUBMIT FOR REVIEW on an article. The message says it was sent, and the note gains one System Log line recording it.
5. Press GENERATE SOP with your daily note open. No SOP is drafted — sop-intake opens instead, and the message says why.
6. Fill one line into that form and press GENERATE SOP again with it open. This time an SOP is drafted from it.

🚨 When it does not work

📖 Related

Notes, the Notebook and Search, What AIOS Can See, sop-intake, article-intake

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