The task tracker lives on the laptop. A second machine, the one in the office, is working on a different project entirely. Your phone can look at either, one at a time, and what it shows changes completely when you switch.

That switch is the clearest way to see the model: nothing merges. You are not looking at a combined feed of everything you own. You are pointing one window at one machine.

Origin, fleet and surface

  • Origin device — the machine doing the work and holding the authoritative record. Every card you answer has one.
  • Fleet — your set of work devices. They share a private mesh, not a record.
  • Surface — a window onto one origin at a time. The desktop app and the phone app are both surfaces.

One active connection at a time is a deliberate simplification, and it buys a property worth having: you always know which machine you are looking at. There is no merged view that could quietly show you the office machine's queue while you believe you are reading the laptop's.

It also decides what happens when a machine disappears. Another surface cannot take ownership of its work, because the work was never on a surface. A surface pointed at a machine it cannot reach shows that plainly rather than falling back to something it saw earlier.

Where the answer is attributed

The archive card came from the laptop's session, so it belongs to the laptop. Answering it from your phone does not move it. The choice is recorded on the origin device, and that device's own rules govern what happens next.

Doing this by hand, you would have the opposite arrangement: the decision happens wherever you happen to be, and the machine finds out when you get back to it and type. That works, and for one machine sitting in front of you it costs nothing. What it does not survive is distance. Once the answer and the work are in different rooms, something has to carry the answer back with its context intact, and a remembered intention is not that.

Identity comes from the mesh

Identity is your private mesh. There are no tokens to paste, store or rotate; revoking a node means removing it from the mesh.

Adding a machine means installing ROOK on it and joining it to the mesh. Your other nodes then see it and offer it in the switcher. Losing a phone means removing that node, in one place, with one action.

That is an identity and connectivity boundary, not a claim that the whole system stands alone. Tailscale coordinates mesh identity and connectivity, and the coding agent still reaches a model provider over the internet.

Limits

This page describes authority and connection. It does not establish which platforms are supported, that ROOK runs for more than one operator, or that there is a released way to install it. Single operator per device is a design decision, not deferred work.

Next

You know which machine holds the work. The next question is whether you can trust what a surface tells you about it, and how to stop that machine safely: device control.