Read agent Markdown away from your desk on the same laptop

An agent's Markdown file is ready to read, but the chat is still beside it. You read a passage, begin to respond, read another passage and return to the conversation. The document has become something you discuss in pieces before reaching its ending.

Give that file a reading sitting apart from the exchange. Choose the document, leave the chat aside and take the same laptop to a different place. The intention is modest: read this one file through, keeping your questions for the conversation afterward.

The person and Doe file below are invented. The filename ending gets its own explanation in this introduction to the .md format. Here, the document is already there; your decision concerns the reading you give it.

Let one file be the reason for leaving the desk

Choose the particular document you want to spend this sitting with. You need no comparison among neighboring files to begin. With that document chosen, let the conversation wait.

Here is an invented account of Jane Doe's reading:

Jane Doe chooses Doe-garden.md and sets the chat aside. She carries the same laptop from her desk to a chair in the garden. She reads Doe-garden.md from beginning to end without responding between passages. On paper, apart from the document, she notes her questions about the garden gate and the path beside the pond. After reading, she returns to the chat and raises those questions.

Her account begins with Doe-garden.md, then puts the chat aside. The chair in the garden comes after that choice. Nothing about the move supplies an answer to the questions she later writes down.

Decide to leave the exchange for after the read. A conversation can wait while you give the existing prose your attention. You are choosing when to discuss it.

Carry the laptop to the place you chose

Take the laptop you were using at the desk to another reading place. Keep the chosen document as the subject of this sitting. Moving the laptop can remain an ordinary act.

In the invented account, Jane Doe carries her laptop to a chair in the garden. That is the place she chooses for reading Doe-garden.md. The account makes no claim that the chair changes what she understands.

Your own place can be ordinary too. Moving there marks your decision to spend this sitting reading, with the conversation left aside. Choose a place you want to read in, then let the document occupy the sitting.

Continue through passages without composing responses

Begin at the beginning and continue through the ending. When a passage brings a response to mind, leave that response for later. Let the thought stay with you while the chat waits.

In her account, Jane Doe gives Doe-garden.md an entire read without responses along the way. Her account places the reading before the questions she notes on paper. An exchange threaded through the document is absent from that account.

Reading through does not mean agreeing with the prose. You may have doubts, objections or an unresolved thought at the ending. Keep those as your own responses to bring back, rather than making each passage the beginning of another exchange.

The invented account uses a quoted paragraph. Markdown offers other enclosures, discussed in how code blocks enclose text. This reading sitting needs only prose.

Put your questions apart from the document

Write the questions you want to retain in your own plain words. Keep enough of the subject to recall what puzzled you. Leave the eventual response unwritten during this sitting with the file.

Jane Doe's paper holds questions about the garden gate and the path beside the pond. Those are the subjects named in her account, after the continuous read and before her return to the chat. The paper stays apart from Doe-garden.md.

Give your questions that separate place. They express what you want to discuss, while remaining apart from its prose. Some thoughts may remain uncertain; you can bring that uncertainty back too.

Rejoin the conversation after the ending

Once the reading is over, return to the chat with the questions you kept. Say which document you read, then describe what you want to discuss in your own words. You have now encountered its ending before beginning that exchange.

Jane Doe returns after reading and raises the questions she noted about the garden gate and the path beside the pond. Her account ends there. It supplies no answer from the agent and no later change to the file.

Keep the document's name with the discussion. Names for Markdown files explains naming choices; in this situation, the name ties your questions to the file you spent the sitting reading.

The sitting can end with questions still open. You chose a document, took the same laptop elsewhere and read through without responding between passages. Bringing your questions back afterward gives the conversation its own turn.

Where Sashmark fits

The planned desktop v1 of Sashmark concerns Markdown: reading it and editing it. Development continues; Sashmark contains no AI and is being built.