Owner's guide
Protections and names
Your Claude pauses or refuses for a small number of written reasons, and it uses a small number of names for real tools and accounts. Both lists are here, so a refusal and an unfamiliar word each have one place to look.
ProtectionsA few rules make your Claude pause or refuse
When your Claude asks or declines, one of these is why.
Personal data stays out of the code.
A scan blocks any push that contains a credential-shaped string, or the base owner's names, emails, and home coordinates — outside the guides, where the owner's own name is deliberately allowed. The identity half is a fixed list rather than a general detector, and adding your own names and addresses to it is a step of setting up your fork. The written rule is to remove flagged data rather than weaken the list.
Every change ships tested.
It passes checks on your machine and again on an independent server before it counts.
Deploys are deliberate, and a saved change is not a live one.
A change is written into your project the moment your Claude makes it, but that is not the same as it running in your live app. Deploying is a separate, deliberate step, and it counts only after your Claude opens the live site and confirms the change is there. If it ever says something shipped, it has looked.
Releases and upgrades happen only on your word.
Your Claude prepares the release and tells you. You decide when your system changes versions.
"Verified" means a human looked.
Its own tests passing is machine-checked, and your Claude looking at the live app is "checked live". It says "verified" only after a person has seen it.
Some things only you can provide.
Account sign-ups, passwords, store credentials. When it needs one, it asks you plainly, once, with exactly what it needs.
NamesEach name is a real tool or account
Your Claude mentions these. Each one says what it is and what, if anything, it needs from you.
- GitHub
- Holds the code and the board. Every task, bug, and plan is an "issue" there, and every change stays on record. You never have to look, and everything your Claude claims to have done is checkable there.
- Railway
- The cloud host in the default setup. It runs your web app and the backend that holds your data. You own the account and pay its small hosting bill. Your Claude operates it.
- Expo
- The toolkit your phone app is built with. One codebase becomes both an iPhone and an Android app.
- Expo Go
- A free preview app for your phone. It runs the newest version straight from your Claude's computer, with nothing to install, whenever your phone can reach that computer. It's the try-it-now path.
- EAS
- Expo's build service. It turns the code into a real, installable app. Needs your Expo account
- TestFlight
- Apple's way to put app versions on your iPhone before the App Store. You get an invite, tap install, and updates come there.
- Store accounts
- Apple Developer (about $99/yr) and Google Play, needed only to ship the app to real phones through official channels. Among the few sign-ups only you can do
- The backend
- The private server that holds all your data: journal, tasks, everything. The apps only read and write it. It's yours alone, and nothing in it flows to anyone else.
- Tokens & passwords
- A token is a long secret string that is your identity to the backend. Your web login is a username and password you choose, stored scrambled on your own backend rather than written down anywhere. Your Claude creates, stores, and rotates the tokens; the login is yours, and Your login covers how it gets set.
- BlockNote
- The rich-text editor, the Notion-style writing surface. It is the body of a document, the long text on a goal, and the note on a task — the same editor each time, with its toolbar hidden on a note so the box stays as plain as it looks.