An experiment, built in a day at a Playgroup on personal productivity · 18 September 2026 ·
Built in a day at my first Playgroup, with Fable 5.1. The story of the day is on the experiments page.
A weekly planner, and the automations that could work it — each one built as a Braitenberg vehicle: a sensor, a wire, a motor. Step lets each vehicle loose on the week in turn; the language further down declares them and the garage draws them. The bill is what you had to grant, and who holds the initiative once you have — on the vehicles' own say-so, as with any permissions manifest.
A Braitenberg vehicle is a machine of sensors wired straight to motors that behaves as if it had intentions (Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles, 1984). The fourteen of them, drawn and mapped to productivity tools, are on the companion page Vehicles, Drawn. Start here: Step runs one vehicle at a time and the trace says what it did and why; the language further down is meant to be edited; the arena at the foot is the result.
! to !!! is importance · 🔔 0.75 is a bell rung by a Reminder, and how loudly · moved marks a task a vehicle moved this run; the italic note in its old slot says where it went · asks: is a proposal waiting for you — nothing happens until you say so · ×2 beside a vehicle in the bar is how many times it acted this run.
Each sensor reads 0–1. drive is how hard the wheels turn: the reading through an excitatory wire (->), or 1 − the reading through an inhibitory one (-|). A vehicle acts when drive reaches its threshold, 0.5 unless set.
This is the editable heart of the page: change a wire, a threshold or a motor here and everything above and below recomputes. One block per vehicle, run top to bottom. A sense line is a wire from a sensor to a motor: -> means the more it senses, the harder it drives; -| means the more it senses, the less it drives, so it settles where the stimulus is strongest. for says which tasks it may touch. needs and initiative are the author's claims about the vehicle — the page repeats them in the bill, it doesn't check them.
One card per vehicle, drawn as Braitenberg would: sensors at the front, wheels at the back, the wires between. Uncrossed wires flee the stimulus, crossed wires charge it, dashed wires inhibit. The number is which of his fourteen vehicles the wiring amounts to. Two vehicles can share a wiring and sit on different rungs: the Chaser is a Vehicle 1 by its wires (one sensor, one motor) yet claims the initiative sits with the goal, because its motor is mail.send with an ask in front of it. It is the motor, not the sensor, that climbs the ladder.
Each row is a twin: a copy of the same week, run with the vehicles named in that row, in that order, then scored. The scores stay separate — five columns, never one number. ★ marks a row nothing else beats on every column; those rows are the front (the Pareto front), and the caption counts them. Evolve is Braitenberg's Vehicle 6, selection: keep the starred rows, copy them with one small change each, score the copies, repeat. The copies are drawn from a fixed random seed (42), so the same generations come out every time and a run can be repeated. Show puts a row's week up in the planner above and prints its wiring below.
deadlines met counts every dated task, so parking a due task is a miss; it does not ask how close to the wire. Run All five, as written and watch Invoice September, due Friday: the Batcher moves it from Monday 14:00 to Friday 16:00 to sit beside Book dentist, the last slot before its own deadline and the very slot the Deadline dodger exists to keep it out of, and the judge scores that deadline as met. Vehicles running in sequence undo each other's intent, which is Braitenberg's point exactly. deep work on quiet days looks only at deep work that is on the week — a judge that only inspects what's placed can be satisfied by parking the lot, and selection will find that. moves, permissions and initiative rung (1 to 7 on the ladder from Vehicles, Drawn, from you to the tool's interest) are costs. When the front is bigger than the room, ties are broken by a plain sum — the one scalar this page admits to, and the one place a designer's taste sneaks in.
After Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (MIT Press, 1984). Companion to Vehicles, Drawn. Sensors read 0–1; a wire either passes the reading through or passes its absence; a vehicle fires when the mean drive clears its threshold.