The record is ROOK's on-device warehouse: an append-only history of cards, answers, events, tasks and file references. It lives on the work machine. The desktop and phone surfaces show windows onto that history; they do not become separate authoritative copies.
[Visual 3 — One warehouse sits on a work machine at the centre. Inside it, a single vertical stream of recorded cards, answers, events, tasks and file references grows downward without older entries being replaced. Read-only windows labelled "desktop" and "phone" sit around it, each connected by an arrow pointing outward from the warehouse. A caption reads: "one on-device record; several windows; no second source of truth".]
One history joins the loops
The work loop and decision loop do not need one terminal conversation to remain alive. A coding session can author a result or a decision card, the warehouse can record it, and a later session can continue from that recorded state. An operator's answer is recorded in the same history as the card it resolves.
ROOK is designed around proof-of-record: workflow state advances when the warehouse records the transition, not merely because a command exits successfully. That makes the record the crossing point between work done earlier and work that begins later.
The pages in this section separate the two sides of that model. The on-device record explains what owns the history. Projections explains how several surfaces can present that history without taking authority from it.
Limits
Append-only does not mean infallible. Proof-of-record is a design boundary, not a promise that every crash is harmless or every retry converges without intervention. A view can also render recorded data incorrectly; sharing one record does not prove that every surface gives it the right meaning.
The authoritative warehouse stays on the work machine, but ROOK is not isolated from external services. The coding CLI calls a model provider over the internet, while device identity and connectivity depend on Tailscale's coordination service.
Next
Start with where the history lives: the on-device record.