goodbuddy/docs/features/magic-notes/technical-design.md

Magic Notes Technical Design

Change Notifications

AssistantDatabase accepts onMagicNotesChanged: () => void. Every successful note/entry create, update or delete emits once after the write commits, including empty-note creation, initial content, title/pin updates and cascading deletion. Saved note analysis, todo completion, saved todo analysis and assistant-data clearing also emit. Revision conflicts, missing rows, rolled-back writes and unchanged todo completion do not emit. Startup schema migrations run before the workbench loads and do not publish notifications.

Desktop IPC and KnowledgeMcpGateway use this same database instance. The latter also serves Agent tools; no tool-specific notification or daemon protocol change is needed. Raw SQL writes from an unrelated process are outside this callback contract.

Main queues notification delivery to the live window on magic-notes:changed. The typed preload method magicNotes.onChanged(listener) exposes no Electron objects and returns a function removing that listener. The existing onTodoStatusChanged event remains the separate sidebar-count signal.

Refresh Lifecycle

MagicNotesWorkspace subscribes on mount and coalesces notifications with a 100 ms debounce. Pending notifications wait for an active local save or analysis to finish. Cleanup removes the listener, clears its timer and invalidates pending refresh results. This does not introduce periodic database polling.

The existing list/detail loader reloads notes and todos, then the preferred note. Request counters reject superseded results and preserve newer user selections. Todo selection survives list reordering while the item exists; replacing the todo snapshot also reloads the selected todo's source entry. Search, filters and layout state are not reset.

Background application of a detail reads the current draft state after the asynchronous fetch. A dirty title is retained, and the composer is not remounted. An entry editor uses its original editing content and revision for both its React key and save request; external revisions cannot remount it or bypass optimistic concurrency checks. Deleted entries remain displayed only while their editor is open. If an externally deleted note has a draft, its editor remains available with a deletion explanation instead of moving the draft to another note.

Read failures use the existing retryable refresh error and retain successful data and drafts. Retry uses the same draft-preserving loader. Interaction rules are owned by the UI design system.

Note List Actions

Each note row has a selection button and a sibling action-menu button. The menu uses the conversation action styles and shared DestructiveConfirmActions, and is portalled to document.body. Its position follows the trigger on scrolling, window resizing and confirmation-size changes. Hiding the list, filtering out the target or leaving the notes panel closes the menu.

Pinning uses the target summary's ID and revision through the existing update IPC. It updates the sorted summary and matching selected detail without resetting title, composer or entry-edit drafts. Deleting uses the explicitly confirmed target ID; deleting another note uses the draft-preserving refresh path. Deleting the selected note clears its entry drafts only after the write succeeds, then selects a remaining note. These are renderer changes; database and Agent contracts are unchanged.

Agent Search Contract

note_search accepts an integer limit from 1 to 100, defaulting to 8. The shared schema supplies both model tool definitions and MCP validation; the existing 128 KiB output budget can reduce the returned result count. The built-in MCP gateway returns invalid scoped-tool arguments as an isError: true tool result with the field and validation message, allowing the model to correct its arguments without an MCP internal-error response. Validation failures do not execute the tool.

These note tools run in the desktop gateway. Remote gbagent ACP sessions currently inject only the image MCP server, so this change requires no daemon implementation update.

Validation

• assistant-database.test.ts checks committed writes with a second SQLite connection, successful mutation coverage, failures, no-op completion and reset.
• knowledge-mcp-gateway.test.ts exercises real database CRUD through Agent/MCP access, including revision failure without an extra notification. A real HTTP MCP client also checks searches above ten results, the published limit schema, invalid arguments and successful retry against SQLite.
• magic-notes-events.test.ts executes the production preload, checking the channel, payload-free callback and listener removal.
• MagicNotesWorkspace.test.tsx covers external updates and deletion, selection, source reload, editor identity and draft saves, coalescing, deferred writes, asynchronous selection races, error retry and unmount cleanup. List-action coverage includes portal placement, keyboard navigation, dismissal, delete confirmation, target selection, revision failures and draft preservation.

No schema migration, dependency, refresh control or network service is added.