Cultivate — thinking sessions¶

ZettelFlow is an engine that makes knowledge evolve. Cultivate is that engine made a daily practice: a short, guided thinking session that takes one idea and makes it measurably more connected and mature (#309).

Where the canvas wizard and quick-capture serve creation, and the dashboards serve diagnosis, Cultivate serves the middle of the lifecycle — DEVELOP → REVIEW → CONSOLIDATE — that used to be passive. It doesn't just tell you what to do; it walks you through doing it.

Starting a session¶

• Home surface → Cultivate mode, the Cultivate — start a thinking session command, or the ribbon menu (🌱). Home also shows a Cultivate teaser with how many ideas still have room to grow.
• ZettelFlow picks the highest-leverage idea (well-connected yet under-developed, via the same nextSession heuristic Home uses). Another idea moves on to the next one.

The moves¶

Each move is a real, one-click operation on the target note — nothing is invented:

The session refines live: after you link a note the connect list shrinks; after you advance the state the next state is proposed. The header shows the idea's degree and maturity — the before/after is a consequence of the moves, never an invented score. Advancing a state (or adding a source/connection) also records a development event for the thinking heatmap.

Ask before revealing¶

#338, epic #335. On by default; one toggle in Settings → Cultivate turns it off.

Three of the five moves used to hand you their answer first — connect listed related notes, challenge listed contradictions, source announced the gap. A session could organise an idea without ever transforming it. So those three now ask a question before they reveal anything:

Question and advance deliberately get none: a question already is your own thought, and advancing a lifecycle state is a decision you are already making. Friction goes only where the system would otherwise answer for you — that is what makes it deliberate rather than a confirmation dialog.

Reveal needs something written — that is the commitment — and records the answer in the judgement record. Skip reveals the move and records nothing: a skip is not a judgement, and you can always skip.

Nothing here writes to your note. On challenge, what you wrote pre-fills the existing counterpoint field so your thinking is not thrown away and you can still save it with one click; on the other two it stays ephemeral rather than adding note noise. A different idea is a different session, so the prompts come back.

Momentum¶

The session header shows a streak and the size of the cultivation queue. Since #339 the streak counts days you exercised judgement — a verdict on an AI proposal, or an answered friction prompt — not days something happened in the vault. Momentum here means thinking, not activity. See cognitive agency.

Principles¶

• Offline-first. Every move is graph-derived. The optional AI actions (challenge-idea, synthesize) are never required — Cultivate works fully without them.
• Layering. The session is a pure projection (buildCultivationSession, re-exported from the Knowledge State surface); the writes live in a Workflow-Engine CultivationService, so the Experience view only reads state (the #266 guard).

Architecture¶

architecture/knowledge/cultivate/cultivationSession.ts   (pure: session + target + readyToCultivate)
  → re-exported via architecture/knowledge/state
architecture/plugin/services/CultivationService.ts        (the writes: link / question / counterpoint / source / advance)
architecture/components/core/cultivate/CultivateModeRenderer.ts  (the Cultivate mode on the Home surface)