Best Practices

Connect high-signal sources first

Not all sources are equally useful. Prioritize the ones where you spend decision-making time:

• Email (Gmail or Outlook) is usually the richest single source — it captures your relationships, commitments, and priorities.
• GitHub or GitLab gives Jackdaw a precise picture of your technical work.
• Linear or Todoist captures what you're actively working on.

Add health and lifestyle sources (Oura, Strava) once the work layer is established.

Capture constraints, not just preferences

Preferences are things you usually want. Constraints are things you always need — and the distinction matters for agents:

• "I prefer TypeScript" → a preference; an agent may use something else.
• "Never use any in TypeScript — it's a project rule" → a constraint; the agent should follow it every time.

The easiest way to capture either is to tell the assistant: "Never generate SQL without parameterized queries." Jackdaw records it as a typed fact — a constraint — and surfaces it to future AIs. Facts you state directly are added to your profile right away; when you later correct something Jackdaw already believed, that change waits in your inbox so you can see what's being overwritten before it lands.

Correct early, correct explicitly

When an AI gets something wrong about you — wrong employer, wrong stack, wrong preference — correct it immediately and specifically:

"That's wrong. I'm not using React — this project is all SvelteKit."

Jackdaw captures the correction as a typed fact that overrides the original. Vague corrections ("that's not right") don't produce reliable updates — be specific.

You don't have to go through the assistant, either. Open the relevant wiki page and edit the fact directly — inline edits save as you go. Telling the assistant is fastest in the flow of a conversation; editing the page yourself is best when you're reviewing your profile and spot something wrong.

Review your inbox

remember, corrections, and AI-proposed facts all land in your inbox before they touch your wiki. Check it regularly — it's how you keep your profile clean. An approved fact becomes part of your wiki and is surfaced to future AIs; a rejected one is logged so the same claim doesn't keep coming back.

Keep the wiki readable

The wiki is read by AI, but authored by you. Write it the way you'd brief a sharp new colleague:

• Use short, declarative sentences.
• Link people and projects with [[wikilinks]] — this builds a graph, not just a list.

A cluttered wiki with contradictory facts is worse than a sparse one. Less, but accurate, beats more, but noisy.