Subroutine guide

Every chapter of the Subroutine guide, in reading order, with the first sentence of each.

The first minute

• Install it, and tell your agent - By the end of this chapter, Subroutine is installed on your computer, Claude Code has its tools and its skill, and the first piece of work on the website rebuild is filed under an account of the agent's own.
• Watch it happen - By the end of this chapter, the work is on a page in your browser, signed in without a password, and you can leave it open on a second screen and watch your agent file and change things as it works.

Working through your agent

• Filing work, and what can be started - By the end of this chapter the website rebuild has real work in it, one task is waiting on another because it genuinely is, and your agent can answer what can I actually start with something better than a list of everything.
• Decisions, findings and dead ends - By the end of this chapter the reason one approach was dropped is written where whoever picks the work up will read it first, a thing that was tried and failed is recorded so that nobody spends the same two days finding out again, and a decision taken once reaches every task underneath it without anybody remembering to link it.
• A question that waits for you - By the end of this chapter your agent has hit something only you can settle, has said so and carried on with other work rather than guessing, and the answer you gave once is sitting on the item for a session that has not started yet.
• An agent per project, handing work over - By the end of this chapter there are two repositories with an agent each, one of them has filed work for the other with the reasoning attached, the second has done it and handed it back, and the item reads as one record of one piece of work rather than four accounts of the same afternoon.
• A standing instruction - By the end of this chapter your agent is working without you: it asks what can be started, takes one thing so that nothing else takes it too, does it, writes down what happened, and hands it back.

Watching and steering in a browser

• The agenda, the list and the board - By the end of this chapter you know which of the three views answers which question, you have moved a piece of work from one column to another, and you can get from any of them to the whole of an item.
• Filing and steering without a terminal - By the end of this chapter you have filed work, said something on an item and changed what it says about itself, without a terminal being part of it.
• Signed in, from a browser or a phone - By the end of this chapter, Keanu is working in his team's Subroutine from his own browser, having installed nothing, and the same address is an app on his phone.
• Your work in your calendar - By the end of this chapter, the website rebuild's deadlines are in Keanu's calendar application, beside the rest of his week, and they keep themselves up to date.

Other agents, other clients

• An agent, with nothing installed - By the end of this chapter, Keanu's coding agent reads and files the team's work through Subroutine's tools, from a machine with nothing of Subroutine's on it: no Python, no package, no configuration file of ours.

The command line

• Everything is reachable from here - By the end of this chapter you can find the command you want without looking anything up, because Subroutine will tell you, and you will know which shape of command you are looking for.
• Your own list - By the end of this chapter, a week of Laurence's work is in Subroutine: what is due, what he has put off until it matters, what comes round every month, and how to ask for one day rather than all of it.
• Your terminal here, your work there - By the end of this chapter, Keanu has the team's work and his own list in one terminal, each item addressed by where it lives, and he can say where a bare number points.

Running one for other people

• An account, an install and a first run - By the end of this chapter, Subroutine is installed on Laurence's server under an account of its own, its instance is made in directories the service will use, and its settings read back to say where each one came from.
• PostgreSQL, and when to switch - By the end of this chapter, the team's work has moved from a file into PostgreSQL, the move is recorded where the service will look for it, and both have been checked before anything is started.
• TLS, a proxy and systemd - By the end of this chapter, the team's instance answers at https://tasks.example.com, listens on loopback with something in front of it terminating TLS, and is kept running by systemd across a restart.
• Adding the people - By the end of this chapter, Laurence and Keanu have accounts of their own on the team's instance, each with the way in they will actually use, and a screen in the office shows the board and can do nothing else.
• An agent's own credential - By the end of this chapter, an agent has an account of its own on the team's instance, reaches the website rebuild and nothing else, and what it writes arrives under its own name rather than under the name of whoever set it up.
• Credentials, and keeping them out of logs - By the end of this chapter, Laurence can see every credential the instance has issued, end any one of them at once, and knows which of his logs would have written a secret down if nothing stopped them.
• Backups, and putting one back - By the end of this chapter, the team's instance is backed up to a volume of its own and pruned on a schedule, and a backup has been put back twice: once as this instance recovering its own data, and once as a separate copy to look at.
• Upgrading - By the end of this chapter, the instance has been checked before and after, its database has been migrated in the right order, and you know what an instance says when new code meets a database that has not caught up.