Core concepts

Six words do most of the work in PlansFlow. Learning them takes a couple of minutes and makes the rest of the documentation considerably shorter.

Project

A project is the outer container and the unit of context. Everything you gather, write, or generate belongs to exactly one project, and every tool reads from that project rather than from a blank slate. Projects do not share material with each other unless you move it deliberately.

Block

A block is a single piece of material on the canvas: a note, a research finding, an image, a file, a generated draft. Blocks are permanent and addressable — you can connect them, group them, and select them as context.

A research answer is a block, not a chat message. That distinction is the reason findings survive: messages scroll away, blocks stay where you put them.

Canvas

The canvas is the spatial view of a project — an infinite surface where blocks live. Position carries meaning here: what you put near what, and what you connect to what.

Board

A board is the same project seen as work in progress: cards in columns, moving from open question through to done. A card is not a copy of a block, it is the block, viewed differently.

Context

Context is the set of blocks a tool can see when it runs. You choose it explicitly — selecting three findings and a file gives a generation exactly that and nothing else. Curating context is the single most useful habit in the product.

Provenance

Provenance is the record of where a finding came from: the source URL, the document, the page. It attaches at the moment a block is created and travels with the block permanently, including into anything generated from it.

Related

Your first project A worked example, end to end. Working with context How to choose what a model sees. Canvas The spatial view in detail. Sources and provenance Why provenance is attached automatically.