Notes
Explicit, versioned, discoverable context that preserves the reasoning behind the work — the memory layer of Harmonic Composition.
Notes
Notes are the memory layer of Harmonic Composition. They preserve the reasoning behind decisions, constraints, and context so that anyone working in the system — people or agents — can understand not just what was decided, but why.
Explicit, versioned, discoverable context that preserves the reasoning behind the work. Every Note has a type that classifies its role, making it easier to find, evaluate, and apply at any point in the delivery lifecycle.
The five Note types
Every Note carries a type that classifies its role in the system.
Confirmed domain knowledge and background. Context Notes document what the team knows about the problem space — the facts and conditions that inform the work without being rules or choices in themselves.
Non-negotiable rules the system must satisfy. Constraint Notes record hard boundaries — technical, legal, organizational, or architectural — that shape what is possible regardless of preference.
Directional preferences, important but not absolute. Guidance Notes communicate how the team prefers to approach a problem without mandating a specific solution.
Recorded choices with rationale. Decision Notes document what was decided, why, and under what conditions — making the reasoning available to anyone who needs to understand or revisit a choice.
Content extracted from uploaded files. Document Notes bring external material — briefs, specifications, reference documents — into the system as structured, discoverable context.
Why Notes matter
The most significant source of waste in delivery is not incomplete work — it is lost context. When a decision is made, the conditions that produced it are rarely written down. As teams change and time passes, those conditions become invisible. Notes make them permanent and retrievable.
Notes are versioned: they accumulate as the system evolves, building a record of how understanding developed over time. They are discoverable: structured so anyone working in the system can find and read them, not only those who were present when they were written.
Notes are not a substitute for real-time communication. They are the residue of communication — the part worth keeping because it will matter later.
Where Notes live
Notes can be scoped to the project as a whole or to a specific Beat. Project-level Notes capture cross-cutting context — decisions and constraints that affect multiple capabilities. Beat-level Notes capture context specific to a single capability and travel with it through its lifecycle.
Notes in the delivery lifecycle
Notes established early in a project capture the reasoning behind the Coda — the constraints and assumptions that shaped the destination. As Beats move through quality evaluation and Revisions are delivered, Notes grow to capture the decisions made along the way.
A constraint Note written at the start of a project may be the deciding factor in an architectural choice made six months later. A decision Note written during one Beat Version's planning may be the reason another capability is scoped differently. Notes make these connections explicit rather than leaving them to institutional memory.
Notes and AI agents
Notes are the primary mechanism by which agents receive structured context. When an agent reasons about a corpus of Beats, it can read Notes the way a new team member reads documentation — but systematically, across every Note at once. A constraint Note doesn't just tell an agent what is off-limits; it tells the agent why, so the agent can determine whether that constraint still applies in a new context.
Without Notes, agents fill context gaps themselves. They fill them quickly, but not necessarily correctly.