Core concepts¶
Questo has about a dozen moving parts. They fit together in one loop, and most confusion comes from mixing up two things that sound similar, so this page defines each one and then draws the loop.
Read this once. Every other page zooms into one piece of it.
The vocabulary¶
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your organisation in Questo. Everything below belongs to it. |
| Tenet | One of eight standing facts about your business. Always exactly eight. |
| Skill | Reusable know-how the agent draws on. |
| Rule | A standing instruction the agent obeys. |
| File | A document: your upload, or something the agent wrote. |
| URL | A named link the agent can read as live reference. |
| Mission | A pursuit run over weeks, checked against its milestones. |
| Milestone | A checkpoint on a mission: what must be true, and often by when. |
| Roadmap week | What one week of a mission is for. |
| Day plan | One mission's gameplan for one day: the tasks proposed for it, each with the reason it is there. |
| Task | One concrete piece of work. |
| Output | One shareable deliverable the agent produced. |
| Insight | A one-line captured signal: a customer quote, a metric, a learning. |
| Inbox card | Something waiting on your judgement. |
| Routine | Recurring work Questo defines. |
How they fit together¶
Read top to bottom, this is the whole product:
- Your knowledge base (tenets, skills, rules, files, URLs) is the standing context every run reads.
- A mission frames a pursuit, and its milestones say what must be true by when.
- The mission's roadmap, when it has one, says what a coming week is for.
- Each weekday morning a day plan turns the mission's diagnosis and this week's intent into a handful of tasks.
- A task executes and produces outputs.
- Along the way, signal gets captured as insights, which feed tomorrow's plan.
- Anything needing your judgement waits in the inbox.
- Routines are what makes steps 4 to 7 happen without you asking.
The loop closes at step 8 and starts again at step 1, because the corrections you make in review are what you write back into the knowledge base.
The pairs people mix up¶
Mission and task differ by duration and steering, not importance. A mission runs for weeks and needs redirection along the way. A task is one thing, done once. See Missions.
Routine is Questo's own recurring work: you can turn it on or off, run it now, or (for web extraction only) set its brief and schedule. Recurring work shaped your own way is a mission. See Routines.
Skill and rule are both knowledge. A skill is something the agent draws on. A rule is something the agent obeys. "How we run a competitive teardown" is a skill; "never claim we are the market leader" is a rule.
File and knowledge file are the same row with one switch flipped. Every document lives in Files. Marking one as knowledge is you saying "this is reference material for the whole workspace", and only then does the agent read it on future runs.
Output and file overlap deliberately. An output is the deliverable as a document you edit, review and publish. A file is a document in the workspace, including the raw material the agent wrote while working. Not every file is worth publishing; an output is the thing that is.
Milestone and objective sit on the same mission. The objective is prose: what the mission does and why it exists. A milestone is a checkpoint that is either true or not yet, and it gets checked each weekday morning. Milestones are optional; an always-on mission often has none.
Who writes what¶
Questo is a shared workspace between you and the agent, and it helps to know which half normally holds the pen.
| Thing | Normally written by |
|---|---|
| Tenets, skills, rules, URLs | You. The agent proposes edits and you approve them. |
| Mission name, playbook, target date | You, then the agent keeps it current as the mission moves. |
| Milestones | Either. The agent writes an update on each one each weekday morning and marks it completed only on evidence. |
| Roadmap weeks | Either. You set the shape, the agent corrects it when reality breaks it. |
| Mission updates | The agent, each weekday morning. |
| Day plans | The agent proposes, you approve. |
| Tasks | Either. |
| Outputs | The agent writes, you edit. |
| Insights | Both. Pulled from your connected tools, or captured by you. |
Nothing in that table is locked. It describes the normal flow, not a permission system. The actual permission rule is much shorter, and it is in Inbox and outputs.
Insights¶
An insight is a single line: at most a sentence, optionally with a quote or link as evidence. "Three prospects this week asked whether we do SSO." "Trial-to-paid was 8% in July." "Competitor X dropped their entry tier to $19."
They are deliberately small. An insight is a signal you can scan, not a document you read.
Insights come from three places:
- the extractor, which reads your connected tools and captures what bears on your missions;
- the insight request routine, which asks you directly when a fact exists only in your head;
- you, whenever you notice something worth keeping.
An insight can be tagged to the missions it bears on, and that tag is what makes it useful. The mission plan reads the insights tagged to its mission, which is how something said in Slack on Tuesday shows up in Wednesday's plan.
An insight that belongs to no mission is still fine. Some signal is just about the market.