Cortex

A personal command center for the Second Brain in Google Drive. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step, plus small Vercel functions for the planner. The browser only ever asks for read-only Drive access (drive.readonly) and nothing depends on a home PC. The plan for version 2 is in docs/cortex-v2-spec.md.

Tabs

Six tabs in the shared top bar, one clean URL each (vercel.json turns on cleanUrls), so every tab is linkable and the back button works. On screens narrower than 1100px the tabs fold into the menu button.

Tab	Route	What it does today
Home	/	Today strip (date, time, weather with today's high and low), today's schedule with the largest open block, Second Brain summary, links to every tab and your quick links
Planner	/planner	Tasks, today, this week and this month (see below)
Finances	/finances	Placeholder until phase 4
News	/news	Placeholder until phase 5
Vault	/vault	Every note with its title and one-line summary (frontmatter name and description), type tag, filters, search and an in-app reader
Ops	/ops	Second Brain checklist (sweep and Muse check from Todoist), notes changed over 30 days (with a table view), Drive storage. Project cards arrive in phase 3

Every Home panel has a plain heading and ends with a link to the place that has the detail. Each source fails on its own: a broken weather or calendar feed shows a message in its own panel.

Signed out, Home, Finances, News, Vault and Ops show only a sign-in screen: no panels and no sample data. The Planner keeps its own dashboard key and shows nothing until the key and its routes work.

Demo (/demo)

/demo is the portfolio version: every tab (/demo, /demo/planner, /demo/finances, /demo/news, /demo/vault, /demo/ops) runs the real pages with made-up sample data, so the layouts are the same as the real app on desktop and phone.

• A banner on every demo page says "Demo with sample data. Nothing here is real."
• Anything that would change data (Link Drive, weather location, Edit quick links, the music player) shows a "Demo only" message instead. Mark new write controls with data-write="<what it does>" and the demo handles them.
• The demo never calls Drive, Todoist, Google Calendar or the weather service, and replaces your name, quick links, routines, weather place and playlist from config.js.
• vercel.json rewrites the demo routes to the real pages and sends X-Robots-Tag: noindex. There is no sitemap. The old /?demo=1 link redirects to /demo.
• Sample data lives in src/demo/. It uses the same TypeScript types as the real data (src/types.d.ts); npm test type-checks the demo data and the /api routes against them, so the two can't drift apart. Finances and News sample data is ready for phases 4 and 5.

Planner (At a glance)

One screen with your Todoist tasks, today hour by hour (6 AM to 10 PM) with open time blocks, the week Sunday to Saturday on the same hours, and the month with event titles only.

• Critical this week: overdue, or P1/P2 due within 7 days
• Quick pickups: label @quick (under 45 minutes)
• Big tasks: label @deep (45 minutes or more)
• Everything else: collapsed list, so nothing disappears; tasks with no size label are marked "Needs size"

Tasks labeled @system (automated, like "Brain sweep ran") are left out of every bucket, count and Home. Label names live in config/topics.json (size labels and topic labels); task-rules.js holds the shared rules Home and the Planner both use. A label in the config that doesn't exist in Todoist is ignored. Home's Top 3 shows each task's topics as text chips, and tasks with a private topic (@health, @money) show only as "Health task" or "Money task" there; full titles stay in the Planner. Until the API is set up, the planner says what is missing and shows no tasks; sample data is only on /demo/planner.

Set these in Vercel (Project → Settings → Environment Variables); .env.example explains each one:

• TODOIST_TOKEN: Todoist → Settings → Integrations → Developer → API token
• GCAL_ICS_URLS: each Google Calendar's "Secret address in iCal format", comma-separated. Anyone with one of these URLs can read that calendar.
• DASH_KEY: any long random string. The planner asks for it once per device and remembers it there.

Google's iCal feed can lag your live calendar by minutes to a few hours.

Files

File	Purpose
index.html, home.js	Home tab
vault.html, vault.js	Vault tab
ops.html, ops.js	Ops tab
finances.html, news.html, tab.js	Placeholder tabs
planner.html, planner.css, planner.js	Planner tab
header.js	Shared top bar and tab menu
brain.js	Shared sign-in screen, Drive link, note types, titles and summaries
src/demo/	/demo: mode.js (banner, "Demo only" message, demo links and profile) and the sample data
src/types.d.ts, tsconfig.json, test/	Shared data types and the checks npm test runs (no build step)
styles.css	Styling for every tab
config/topics.json	Todoist size and topic labels, and which topics are private on Home
task-rules.js	Shared task rules: labels, Critical, Planner buckets, Home title privacy
config.js	Your settings: Google client ID, folder ID, weather location, quick links, routines
hud.js	Ring clock and bar chart
drive.js	Read-only Google Drive access
weather.js	Weather from Open-Meteo
api/tasks.js	Todoist tasks, labels, projects and sections for the Planner and Home (needs DASH_KEY)
api/checks.js	Ops checklist health checks: the newest completion of "Brain sweep ran" and "Muse check ran" in the last 7 days, from Todoist's activity log (needs DASH_KEY)
api/calendar.js	Google Calendar events from iCal feeds (needs ); also used by Home's schedule

Setup

1. Host it. In Vercel, connect the cortex-brain project to this repository (Settings → Git). No build command or output directory is needed; Vercel installs ical-expander for the calendar function from package.json.
2. Create a Google OAuth client at console.cloud.google.com:
   1. Create a project, then enable the Google Drive API.
   2. Under Google Auth Platform, set up the consent screen (External), add yourself as a test user, and add the .../auth/drive.readonly scope.
   3. Create a Web application client. Under Authorized JavaScript origins add the site URL exactly, with no trailing slash (for example https://cortex-brain-task-forge3.vercel.app).
3. Paste the Client ID (ends in .apps.googleusercontent.com) into googleClientId in config.js. The client secret is not used.
4. Open the site and press Link Drive.

Accessibility

Aiming for WCAG 2.2 AA: one h1 per tab, landmarks and headings for every panel, a skip link, visible focus outlines, 44px touch targets, status shown with words and icons rather than colour alone, a table view for the activity chart, and animations switched off when the system asks for reduced motion.