Care for your workspace

For terminal examples, run workspace commands from the workspace root. External projects and stack bundles are sibling directories; adjust their relative paths.

Your brain is readable local Markdown. Keep the whole workspace together: .tdt/ also holds configuration, ownership records, pending operations and canonical skills. Host directories contain workspace-local bridges and settings. External projects remain at their registered paths and need separate backups.

Back up and restore

Close UI sessions, stop agent sessions and let ThisDamnThing writes finish before copying the entire workspace, including hidden directories. Keep backups private and preserve file contents and directory structure. Restore a consistent whole copy, then use /tdt-workspace in a fresh agent session to check it (terminal: tdt --workspace PATH doctor). Doctor checks files and state; check host trust and skill discovery separately. Do not discard ownership records to make an edited file pass validation.

Upgrade or move

Ask your agent to help back up and upgrade or move the workspace, giving the intended destination or release. There is no dedicated core upgrade or move skill. Use /tdt-workspace to check the result and /tdt-update-stack for optional stack updates. In Codex, use $ in place of / or the skill picker.

Technical procedure

Back up first. For a release installed from PyPI, use pipx upgrade thisdamnthing. For a source installation, run pipx install --force . from the chosen newer checkout. Then run tdt init "." to refresh unchanged owned core resources, guides and hook paths for saved enabled hosts. Init preserves unrelated files and refuses edited or missing owned content. Preserve edits separately and reconcile against your backup before retrying. Keep the pipx environment available because hooks refer to its Python interpreter.

After moving the workspace, rerun init at the new location, inspect generated hook paths and review host trust again. A move does not relocate external projects or rewrite references inside notes. Registering a moved project path creates a new identity; approved project knowledge is not automatically refreshed.

Core refresh does not update optional stacks. Use /tdt-update-stack for each selected stack. Terminal alternative: run tdt stack update ID --check, review the replacement, then approve its exact token. Review executable trust and prerequisites separately. Restart host sessions after core, stack or skill changes. See recovery for interrupted operations.

Know what is private

Candidates, approved notes, project paths, local configuration, skill proposals and UI responses can contain private information. Brain approval makes a note eligible for retrieval; it does not authorize publishing or sharing it. Secret filters are heuristic, so inspect content before approval, backup sharing or export. Full conversation transcripts stay with the host; ThisDamnThing capture stores summaries and provenance references rather than full transcripts. Optional history discovery reads only identified accessible histories and does not persist its raw output.

UI close stops the service and retains responses; cleanup deletes that session's retained data. Keep session URLs private. Provider indexes are disposable local state and may also contain sensitive derived data. Markdown remains authoritative. Trusted hooks, providers and custom browser code must be reviewed: local provider subprocesses retain normal OS access, and workspace policy is agent guidance rather than an operating-system sandbox. ThisDamnThing does not change host permission settings.