Apps & documents

Everything is a document. Every document has a home.

The agent doesn’t answer next to your work — it works in it. Pages, boards, sheets, canvas, handwriting, audio: each is a document of some kind, each kind has an editor, and the apps on top are just folders that know how to show them. Agents create, fill and reshape all of it with the same tools you use.

Cortex

Chat, document and execute on one surface.

Cortex is where most work happens: a file tree on the left, the open document in the middle, the agent on the right — and a run panel when a document can execute. Whatever kind you open, Cortex picks the right editor.

Quick-open with ⌘O / ⌘P across the whole project.
Discussions tab: the inbox threads about the open document, right next to it.
PDF export with report themes — one CSS layer per customer or purpose.
Translate a selection, play audio and video in the preview, open encrypted documents locally.

Cortex tour →

# one surface, any kind
notes/kickoff.md          markdown
plan/q4-budget            sheet      =SUM(B2:B9)
ideas/map                 canvas     12 nodes · 3 groups
release/checklist         checklist  7 / 9
sketch/whiteboard         scribble   A4 · 3 sheets
analysis/run              compose    python ▶ ✓ 2.1s
private/keys.md           age        🔒 decrypt locally

Apps

Fifteen apps, one data model.

An app is a folder with a manifest. Its pages are ordinary documents — so the agent can read and write them, you can link to a place inside them, and they show up in search, WebDAV and exports like everything else.

workbook

Workbook

Notion-style pages in a block editor — with form fields, quizzes graded by an LLM, and runnable compose blocks.

wiki

Wiki

Linked knowledge pages for a team or a topic.

kanban · issues

Kanban & Issues

Boards and an issue tracker — cards and tickets are documents an agent can triage, move and close.

gtd

GTD

Capture, buckets, drag-sort and a trash that empties itself — your own list, kept clean.

journal

Journal

Dated entries that the agent can summarise, search and pick up again.

calendar

Calendar

Events as documents — plan with the agent, not around it.

canvasbook

Canvasbook

A folder of canvas pages: nodes, edges and explicit groups on an open plane.

scribblebook

Scribblebook new

Handwriting sheets with pen or finger — OCR, PDF, and an agent that can look and draw.

designer

Designer new

Design collections of web files with a sandboxed live preview and a catalogue of design skills.

finance

Finance

Structure money decisions as trees of options, costs and outcomes.

slideshow

Slides

Decks from research — one point per slide, an image per point if you like.

binder

Binder

A reference binder over documents of any kind, anchored by a manifest.

links

Links

A link manager for the outside web, with live previews and teasers.

Search

One search surface over your documents and configured research sources.

inter-links

Links into apps

A link can point to a place inside an app — a card, an entry, a node — and is resolved late, so it survives reorganising.

New in 0.5

Handwriting, questionnaires, design.

Three new ways to put things into Vancetope — and for the agent to put things back.

kind: scribble

Scribble

Vector strokes on A4 sheets, pen or finger. Print it, OCR it, export a PDF. A vision model gets a clean image of the sheet, and drawing tools let the agent annotate it.

kind: questions

Questionnaires

Several questions in one document, answered through a wizard in the web chat or line by line in the terminal. When an agent needs your input, it asks with one of these.

app: designer

Designer

A design is a folder of HTML, CSS and assets. The preview runs in an opaque-origin sandbox, so a design can look like anything without being able to touch anything.

Document kinds

Thirty-odd kinds, one API.

A kind says what a document is — and so which editor opens it and what the agent can do with it. They all share the same read/write/version/lock surface, so a new kind is a new editor, not a new storage system.

workpage markdown sheet canvas mindmap diagram chart slides timeline map graph tree list records checklist calendar finance-tree scribble questions qrcode data formula tex compose age application app-view vance-recipe vance-workflow vance-scheduler vance-guard vance-hook vance-wizard vance-model vance-research-source vance-chat-theme

The vance-* kinds are the system’s own configuration — recipes, workflows, schedules, guards, models. They get form views and templates like any other document, which is why an agent can set up an automation by writing one.

Bistromath

Apps the agent builds for you.

Need a little tool nobody ships — a tracker, a calculator, a dashboard over your own documents? Ask for it. The app-builder recipe writes an app view: a document with a main.js that runs sandboxed in a null-origin iframe and talks to your data only through a narrow API.

Five bundled libraries — core, api, db, fmt, ui — so apps stay small.
Governance: apps are forbidden by default; each one asks for approval through your inbox.
Just a document: versioned, shareable, changeable by the next prompt.

Bistromath spec →

# view.yaml — the widget names a state key
  - type: table
    from: invoices
    columns: [nr, customer, amount]

// main.js — runs in a null-origin sandbox
async function onAppInit() {
  const files = await vance.documents.list('invoices/')
  const rows = []
  for (const f of files)
    rows.push(await vance.documents.read(f.path))
  vance.state.set('invoices', rows)
}

Images, audio, scripts

Beyond text.

The agent can make and change the things that go into a document, not only the words around them.

fenchurch

Images

Generate pictures from a description with a style cascade per project — and now edit an existing image, image-to-image.

hotblack

Audio new

Text-to-speech, transcription, music, audio analysis — plus local trim, mix, concat and convert via ffmpeg.

compose

Runnable pages

Shell, Python, JavaScript, R, LaTeX or an LLM call — one block in a page, executed server-side, the result lands back in the page.

Working together

People and agents in the same document.

Collaboration isn’t a feature bolted on — it’s how every document works, whoever is typing.

live