I’ve been struggling a little with having a common task/project language with LocalGPT, which is sort of my OpenClaw it’s okay to like.

LocalGPT was making Markdown files with project content in them. It wasn’t very structured and I had no simple way to quickly interact with a project; just open-read-edit and a sense that it was more cumbersome than I wanted. There was also some “oh, btw, check in a few other inboxes” that was making life harder and slower.

I realized this morning that I wrote a spec for how I think about tasks and projects when I did denote-tasks earlier in the year. It covers all the things I care about, and its TUI is how I prefer to process lists of things to do. At one point I was running a local MCP that understood the denote-tasks spec, but it was slow and I wasn’t very far along on personalizing work management with AI.

So I pulled denote-tasks back out, added JSON output, added better search/query features, and a SKILL.md meant to help agents gravitate toward the machine-friendly parts. No need for an MCP, and it feels a bit more predictable and deterministic. Previously, the quality of interactions over open projects and tasks was more variable. Not exactly hallucinations but just a little sloppier than I’d like.

With denote-tasks I get a TUI for quickly making/managing tasks that operates the way my ideal list manager works, but underneath it’s Markdown-n-YAML so it works for readability but has structured data a machine can deal with better.

From the looks of it so far, just going through and having LocalGPT process those free-form project files, then interact with me to bring order to the resulting denote-task tasks, bolting on the more machine-friendly approach is making things smoother when working through projects.

I ought to change the project name. It borrows the denote file naming convention and format, and I believe it would all parse as clean denote content, but I don’t actually use Denote (or Emacs much lately) and don’t want to give the impression I’ve got anything to do with Prot’s thing.