pTask

PureTensor's sovereign, single-binary task manager. One command — pt — to capture, find, finish, and review work, from terminal, TUI, Telegram, HTTP API, MCP-native agents, or the web cockpit. Rust, SQLite, no subscriptions, no cloud dependency.

Status: production-active on the PureTensor fleet since the v1.0 activation (2026-05-14); the v2 agent-native program completed 2026-07-02. The current version lives in Cargo.toml (workspace.package.version) — this line intentionally names no number, after the v1.1.1/v1.2.0 README drift.

What it does

• Capture fast — inline-token quick-add (2026-10-02 @home p1 ~30m, every monday at 9am), idempotent capture lane that fast-tracks fleet incidents (severity ≥ 3) into tasks.
• Find fast — Linear-style PT-N IDs, filter DSL (pt list "(today | overdue) & p1"), FTS5 full-text search, saved views.
• Work in order — DAG dependencies (pt depend PT-3 --on PT-1; pt next shows only unblocked tasks, and a task cannot be closed while a prerequisite is open), composite priority scoring with explainability (pt why PT-42), recurrence (every vs every!), snooze.
• Stay honest — attributed event log (pt log: who did what, via which surface), pt undo, accountability escalation state machine with Telegram/SMTP/HAL notifications, staleness reaper for machine-generated tasks, operator approval inbox (pt approval / pt approve / pt reject: agents request, only the operator decides, executors consume once — docs/approvals.md), goal tree (pt goal / pt context: every task traces up to the mission — docs/goals.md).
• Feed the agents — MCP server (request/list/status/withdraw for approvals; no decide tool; goal_list / goal_show / goal_link; goal_chain on show/next/claim) over streamable-HTTP and stdio, atomic task_claim so parallel agents can't collide, discovered_from provenance links, deterministic task_digest session priming, scoped named API tokens.
• Distill the noise — native Rust distillation turns raw fleet signals into deduplicated tasks (Gemini structured-output classify/consolidate, semantic + temporal dedup, close-on-recovery). Chunked with per-chunk failure isolation, so one unprocessable capture is quarantined instead of wedging the queue behind it (pt_distill_quarantined_captures). pt distill is canonical; the legacy Python pipeline is archived for reference only.

Quick start

pt add "Buy bread 2026-10-02 @home p1 ~30m"      # inline-token quick-add
pt list "(today | overdue) & p1"                  # filter DSL
pt next                                           # DAG-ready tasks
pt done PT-42                                     # complete
pt why PT-42                                      # explain a task's priority score
pt                                                # opens the TUI
pt serve                                          # axum HTTP server: sync API, capture, webhooks, metrics
pt bot                                            # Telegram bot (long-poll)
pt mcp                                            # MCP server over stdio

pt --help lists all ~40 subcommands; pt gen-manpage / pt gen-completions generate the manpage and shell completions. Full reference: docs/cli-reference.md.

Surfaces

Surface	Entry point	Notes
CLI	pt <verb>	PureTensor fleet terminal theme (fleet-upgrade look); --json for machine output, --no-color / --color, --idempotency-key for safe retries
TUI	pt / pt tui	ratatui
Sync API	pt serve	axum; canonical store on one host, clients use pt remote
Telegram	pt bot	Bot API long-poll
MCP (agents)	pt mcp (stdio) or /mcp mount on the server	20 tools; bearer-gated HTTP for HAL, scoped REST tokens for other agents — docs/agent-surface.md
Web	dashboard/	PTASK Triage Cockpit — read-only Python sidecar over the same DB; writes delegate to the pt binary

Architecture

Single Cargo workspace, single binary pt. SQLite via rusqlite (bundled), migrations via refinery, TUI via ratatui, HTTP via axum, dates via jiff + interim. Filter DSL and recurrence use hand-written parsers (no parser-combinator dependency).

Crate	Role
ptask-core	Domain logic: storage, parsing, scoring, accountability
ptask-cli	The pt binary and all subcommands
ptask-server	Sync API, capture, webhooks, MCP HTTP mount, metrics
ptask-tui	Terminal UI
ptask-bot	Telegram bot
ptask-distill	Native Rust distillation orchestrator + ML stages (native-ml feature)
ptask-notify	Notification adapters (Telegram/SMTP/HAL) behind ptask-core's Dispatch trait

Fleet topology (canonical store, Litestream WAL replication to CephFS, per-node roles, ansible rollout): docs/architecture.md. Backups, restore drills, and timers: docs/operations.md.

Documentation

• docs/cli-reference.md — every subcommand
• docs/dsl.md — the filter DSL
• docs/recurrence.md — recurrence semantics (every vs every!)
• docs/sync-api.md — HTTP API
• docs/agent-surface.md — MCP tools, claim/lease mechanics, provenance
• docs/approvals.md — operator approval inbox (payload binding, consume, authority, threat model)
• docs/goals.md — goal tree, inheritance, cycle guard, pt context
• docs/architecture.md — self-hosted topology and canonical-store election
• docs/operations.md — backups, timers, runbooks
• docs/master-plan.md — the historical 12-phase build plan (complete) and design lineage

Design lineage

Linear's data model (fixed status categories, <TEAM>-<N> IDs, cycles), Todoist's quick-add + filter DSL + recurrence, dstask's git-diffable export. pTask replaced an earlier Python task store (retired at v1.0). See docs/master-plan.md for the design lineage.

License

Proprietary. Copyright (c) 2026 PureTensor, Inc. All rights reserved. See LICENSE. Source is published for review; use, copying, and distribution require a written commercial license from PureTensor.