The loop

work  →  versions  →  score  →  calendar slot  →  shipped

Every craft that kilna targets — music, prose, podcasting, blogging — repeats the same cycle. You make something, you revise it, you decide whether it’s good enough, you decide when it goes out, and eventually it does. kilna models that cycle once and lets the craft configure the vocabulary. See Profiles for how the vocabulary part works.

Work

A work is the thing you’re making — a song, a chapter, an episode, a post. It has a title, a kind (drawn from the active profile), a status, and whatever craft-specific fields the profile defines (BPM for a song, point-of-view for a chapter).

Its status follows the rest of this loop rather than being kept up by hand: scoring makes a work scored, a calendar slot makes it scheduled, going out makes it released. Setting one yourself pins it — see Statuses.

Versions

A work accumulates versions: whole bodies of text, not diffs. Each version has a role — a song keeps lyrics and style as independent drafts; a chapter keeps text, outline and notes. One of a work’s versions is marked current, but every prior one stays readable.

A saved version never changes. Revising means starting the next revision from it — one button in the editor — which is what keeps a score honest about the text it judged. See Writing a version.

Bodies are stored whole because text is measured in kilobytes and reconstructing a document from a diff chain is a well-known source of corruption for no meaningful saving. See ADR 0002.

Score

A score rates a work along the axes its profile defines — hook, lyrics, emotion for a song; pull, prose, character for a chapter — and combines them into a total and a tier. Crucially, a score is a snapshot pinned to a version, not the current state of the work. Rewrite the second verse, score again, and you can see the total move from 62 to 78 — the whole point of scoring is making the effect of a revision visible. Details in Scoring.

Calendar slot

A scored work becomes a release: a plan to ship it somewhere, as some kind, on some date. A day holds as many releases as you put on it — pointing at a date is a decision, and a rule that argued with it read as a fault rather than as care. What the score still decides is the order of the queue, and which work the automatic layout reaches for first. Walkthrough in Planning a release.

Shipped

Shipping is a state you set, not an integration kilna performs. You mark a release released, optionally with the link it went out on, and that’s it. Plugins can automate the mechanical parts of getting something out the door later, but the loop closes without them — kilna never needs to know how the work actually reached an audience.

Why this shape

The predecessor project split “work” into a separate concept from “release” management in ways that scattered the same fact across multiple places. kilna keeps one row per unit of release rather than three tables for the same idea. The trade-off, and the alternatives considered, are in ADR 0001.