A business is rules and knowledge.
Strip away the tools and a business is two things: what it knows, and the rules it runs on. Mandala keeps exactly those two, as documents and contracts you can read. You build them by talking with your accomplice, and you grow them the same way.
Hermes wants to start a holiday run with no Slurm on board. He doesn’t open a project tool, a spreadsheet and a form builder.
He writes one document about what the run is, and tells Mira how a delivery should go: check the cargo, Leela confirms the big ones, then ship. Mira drafts the contract and tries it. Hermes reads it and signs.
The business now has a new process that everyone, Mira included, works inside. It took a conversation.
What you sell, who your customers are, how things are done. Plain documents, typed and linked. Medha
What an order is, what must be true before it ships, who may approve what. Short contracts. Dharma
It reads the knowledge, acts within the rules, and brings you what needs a decision. Prajna
Describe the process. Read the rules. Sign.
Say how it should work in your own words. Your accomplice drafts the contract, tries it on a scratch copy and shows what it would accept and refuse. Nothing is installed until you sign it.
New→Cargo checked→Confirming· Leela approves→Packed→Delivered
Where this stands: drafting a contract with your accomplice, trying it and installing it on your approval works today, from the Workbench. Screens for it come from a screen file, which today is written separately. Having the screens drafted in the same conversation, and installing without a restart, are coming.
Goals, cycles, and a debrief that changes something.
Write down what matters and how you’ll know. Your accomplice carries work toward it between conversations, tells you each night what it did, and asks when it is unsure.
Project, Area, Initiative, Task, with goals above them and cycles to work in. Each cycle ends with results and a debrief.
React to what it did, with a sentence why. What should last becomes a rule you can read and edit.
It starts by proposing. Widening what it may do alone, one kind of work at a time, from what you approved before, is being built.
Forms unsigned, dark matter low. 3 initiatives.
One promise open: Gus’s Tuesday slots.
Proposed 1
Next: ask Nibbler for a quote · Oct 14
ApproveActive 2
Next: forms beside his soup · Tue 10:40
Next: reply drafted, waiting for your OK
Waiting 1
Waiting on Mark S. until Oct 15
Closed 1
Proof: booking DL-1182 confirmed
What it takes to start.
A modest VPS, a home server or your Mac. No fleet of services to rent and connect.
Sign in with the plan you already have. Quick work uses a light model; only hard problems use the expensive one.
There is no hosted Mandala to bill you by the head. What you build stays on your machine.
Your knowledge is Markdown, your rules are text, your history exports. Leaving is copying a folder.
Said plainly: Mandala today suits a founder who runs the business themselves and wants its operations written down and enforced from the first day. A team where each person signs in, and a business described entirely by conversation with its own set of accomplices, are where it is going, not where it is. A public website or store keeps its frontend framework, with Mandala as the backend behind it; sign-in for your customers and payments are not built yet. Mandala vs web frameworks
It gets better because the loop is closed.
Rules decide what may happen. The ledger keeps what did. Your accomplice reads the ledger, and proposes better rules. You approve them. Most tools give you one of those. A business needs the circle.
The last arrow is partly built. What works and what doesn’t yet