Read path vs write path

The app shows you everything, and yet almost none of it is hand-editable. That sounds like a contradiction until you see the rule: the screens are the read path; the agent is the write path. Everything is visible; nearly nothing is edited in place. To change what Dustav knows or built, you tell it, and it makes the change with its own tools.

Why not just let people edit directly?

Direct editing is the obvious feature, and we rejected it on purpose:

• Provenance. A workflow row traces to the email it came from — that's what makes the table auditable. Rows are never created by hand, and every change to one, by you or by Dustav, lands in the row's history with who made it and why, so no value floats free of the record.
• Coherence. Hand-edited state goes stale in ways its editor can't see — the fact deleted while three other things still reference it. The agent, editing through its tools, keeps the record consistent because it can see how the pieces fit.
• Security. The facts and tables are the agent's highest-trust input. A free-text box that writes straight into them is an injection surface aimed at the most sensitive part of the system.

The deliberate exceptions

Three places you type directly, because there the words are yours: the email composers (a reply is your message — Dustav drafts it, you own every character that sends), the calendar's edit modal (your own hand on your own event — the one direct write to your Google Calendar, which is exactly the fence working as designed), and a single cell of an existing table row (a quick fix to one value; never a new row or a new column, and the change is kept in the row's history). And the account-level acts you'd never want mediated by a model — disconnect, delete — are deterministic buttons, not requests to an AI.

The rule underneath, stated precisely: you supply bytes and set references; Dustav writes words. Uploading your real checklist, linking a document to a template, picking which template a workflow drafts from, marking a card done, pausing a rule, booking a staged date — those are yours, one click each, and they need no model in the loop. The moment a control would let you edit the words of a document or a fact by hand, it's a different product, and that's the line we hold.

No agent knobs, either

The same split explains why Dustav has no personality settings. Its name, voice, and manner are fixed — authored once, the same for every business. What varies per business is knowledge (your facts, your voice-as-written, your workflows), and knowledge is changed the same way as everything else: by telling it. A wall of dials is a control panel, not an agent.

The throughline: see everything; change it by talking; commit the outbound yourself.