The lineage

Iterations

These working sessions did not run in parallel — they converged. A cursor brief became a portable grammar, the grammar turned inward onto a screen-vision copilot, the copilot was stress-tested against real scenario coverage, and the whole vocabulary finally landed in a shipping macOS companion. Here is the path, one node per step: what each contributed, what changed from the one before it, and where it lives.

  1. 01

    Honest Cursor v0.2

    Contributed. The thesis and its first scaffold. Calibrated uncertainty becomes a visible interaction state, not a tone of voice: four cursor postures — confident, partial, held, refused — composed with four interaction primitives (propose-and-wait, show your work at the tip, calibrated states, quiet mode). The hero is the held “I don’t know” state — a cursor that holds still rather than degrading into plausible text. The first prototype lives in the Cowork “leave-and-return” flow, a held pricing.md file the user returns to after stepping away.

    Changed from prior. The origin node — there is no prior step. It establishes the grammar everything downstream inherits: posture over percentages, action as a co-signature, the held state as the product.

    No separate demo link; the Cowork leave-and-return flow appears in the v0.4 player.

    .design-sources/design1/magic-cursor/project/ — Honest Cursor - Design Brief.md

  2. 02

    Honest / Magic Cursor v0.4

    Contributed. The grammar matured from one scenario into five keyframed end-to-end flows — Azure portal, Cowork, Excel, Outlook, Workday — each walking a complete task with a companion palette narrating in voice. Added the companion palette (voice, markup, transcripts, a live step-tracker) and the cursor-mode widget, plus the consolidated companion palette token set.

    Changed from prior. From a single Cowork scaffold to a portable grammar proven across five host apps. The four states and four primitives held; what changed is scope — the cursor now travels across whatever app the user is in, and flows are modeled as keyframe data the player walks rather than a bespoke state machine.

    Live demo /demos/honest-cursor

    .design-sources/design3/magic-cursor/project/ — HANDOFF.md

  3. 03

    Seeing States v0.3

    Contributed. The screen-vision copilot. A VisionSession runtime expressed as a lifecycle × mode × attention state machine, with a shown-surface taxonomy (halo, pill, region box, chip, banner, modal, mask, ghost cursor, agent cursor, step rail), a macro/witness record-and-replay lifecycle, and a privacy/redaction layer that masks sensitive frames before OCR ever runs.

    Changed from prior. Turns the cursor grammar inward, onto a copilot that watches a shared screen. The posture vocabulary stays, but it is now grounded in a formal backend state machine with min-dwell debouncing and an obligatory shown response for every failure mode — the Honest Cursor’s “no silent failures” made into a runtime contract.

    Live demo /demos/seeing-states

    .design-sources/cocopilot/outlining-seeing-states-diagram/project/ — SPEC.md

  4. 04

    Seeing States v0.4 (integration)

    Contributed. Folded an audit of ~28 scenarios back into the state machine: an 8-verb intent axis, an M-08 monitoring mode, voice promoted to a first-class input, multi-region frames, and the V3 toolbar adopted as the default. One state machine, one toolbar source, one icon set, one token root.

    Changed from prior. From a clean lifecycle to a model stress-tested against real scenario coverage. The intent axis names what the session is trying to do; monitoring and voice-in widen the input surface; multi-region handles N screens at once. Applied in place — no branched files, no duplicated components.

    Live demo /demos/seeing-states

    .design-sources/cocopilot/outlining-seeing-states-diagram/project/ — INTEGRATION.md

  5. 05

    Selecta macOS notch companion

    Contributed. The grammar applied to a shipping shape: a voice-first agent companion that lives in the MacBook hardware notch by default, with an avatar that can attach to the cursor. SwiftUI + AppKit, built on vector Shape primitives and motion math — no rendering libraries. The same postures, the same propose-don’t-impose stance, the same just-in-time consent boundary, now embodied in an OS-level presence rather than a web prototype.

    Changed from prior. From scripted web demos to a real macOS app. The cursor channel and the notch presence are independent surfaces; quiet mode and consent are first-class; the held/calibrated postures carry over as the avatar’s state lifecycle. This is where the research grammar becomes a product.

    Downstream app — no web demo.

    /CLAUDE.md + /docs/selecta/

The convergence is what the rest of this site documents — the shared vocabulary in grammar and the load-bearing constraints in principles.