Folders as an Org Chart

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.

3.3.1Folders are your org chartAdd note

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.

operating-base/
  marketing/
  sales/
  customers/
  money/
  ops/
  app/          (the product itself)

Now the structure of the work and the structure of the files are the same thing, and anyone who opens the tree, you or an agent, understands the operation in ten seconds.

3.3.2One folder per functionAdd note

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.

3.3.3Each department runs from one status fileAdd note

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.

# Sales — status

## Rules
- Never promise a date we have not agreed internally.

## Current state
- 3 live deals, 1 in contract.

## Log
- 2026-07-08: sent the Acme proposal.

It is the one surface an agent reads to do the work and writes to record what it did. You never hunt for the truth of a department; it is always in that file.

3.3.4Start with the departments you haveAdd note

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:

Act as a senior engineer setting up my operating system.
In my operating base, create one folder per function I run,
and put an empty _status.md in each, with three headings:
Rules, Current state, Log. Do not invent functions I did
not name.

The functions I run today:

Do this now: paste the prompt above and list the functions you actually run, so your agent builds the department tree for you.