Your operation is a dozen different kinds of work, scattered across apps and your head, with no place an agent knows to look. This chapter turns it into folders: an org chart on disk that you and your agents read the exact same way.
9.3.1Folders are your org chart
Before you write a line of automation, draw your operation as directories. Marketing, sales, money, customers, ops: each box on the whiteboard becomes a folder in your operating base.
Now the structure of the work and the structure of the files are the same thing. Anyone who opens the tree, you or an agent, understands the operation in ten seconds.
Notice what those folders will hold: your revenue, your customers, your decisions. So if you put this tree under version control, the repository is private, and the same .gitignore habit from your secrets setup covers anything with a key in it. Keep notes about customers here if you like, but their actual records stay in the app's database, where the Protect part's rules about personal data apply.
9.3.2One folder per function
Organize by function, never by tool or file type. You do not want a spreadsheets folder and a docs folder; you want a sales/ folder that holds everything sales, whatever the format.
High cohesion inside each folder, clean seams between them. When an agent works on sales, it opens one folder and finds the whole world it needs, and nothing leaks across the walls.
9.3.3Each department runs from one status file
Every folder gets a single control file, a status file, call it _status.md. It holds three things: the rules for that department, its current state, and a running log.
It is the one surface an agent reads to do the work and writes to record what it did. The rule is standing: any agent that works in a department appends a dated line to its Log before it finishes. That way you never hunt for the truth of a department. Later, your briefing command reads these files to build the one-screen picture, which is why keeping them honest pays off.
9.3.4Start with the departments you have
Do not model the company you dream of. Model the one that exists today. Three folders is a fine start.
You add a department the day a real function appears, not before. The org chart grows the way the operation grows, one folder at a time, and it never carries rooms nobody lives in.
This prompt has your agent build the tree for you:
Do this now: paste the prompt above and list the functions you actually run, so your agent builds the department tree for you.
