Doing

Running in the background

Settings › Running in the background is everything Moe does on its own while you work: one pane, five tabs, Speaking up · Reminders · Keeping up · Learning about you · Activity. Some of it starts on: the glow, the ten-minute look at your calendar, notes and messages, thinking on its own, the calendar heads-up, and quiet hours. The rest is off until you switch it on, and each row says what it is doing right now. Turning anything off stops it straight away, and it stays off after a restart.

The amber glow#

Everything Moe wants to tell you on its own arrives one way: the dot beside the notch turns bright white. (It used to be an amber glow that pulsed; the heading keeps the old name so links to it still work.) Hover and it opens a card: when it was for, what it says, and three things you can do. Play hears it, and lets Moe know you have. Reply opens a field on the card itself: type "I did", "not now", "remind me tomorrow" or "stop reminding me about that" and Moe acts on it, because it knows exactly which message you are answering. Dismiss drops it without reading it out; Moe is told quietly. Moe never speaks first. One thing waits at a time, the next stays in line until you have played or dropped this one, and the dot stays dim while Moe is talking or during a meeting; it shows the moment Moe is free again.

The same bright dot means a new version of Memoe has downloaded and is ready to install. Tap the notch and the panel opens on A new version of Memoe is ready. with Restart to update and Later; Later dims the dot again for a day. If a reminder is waiting too, it plays first. An update shows even with Let Moe bring things up on its own off, because an update is Moe looking after itself.

Speaking up#

Let Moe bring things up on its own is the one switch for Moe looking at your things on its own and saying so. It starts on. Off, nothing below runs and nothing glows; reminders you asked for still arrive, and so does a new version of Memoe waiting to be installed.

Tell me before something in my calendar starts — Don't, or 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes before; it starts at 10. That long before something in your calendar, you get one sentence, "Standup with Dan starts in 8 minutes — Room 4", with the amber glow, and forwarded to any chat you have ticked under Reminders. Nothing about it thinks: it reads the copy of your calendar Moe already keeps, works out what is starting, and says so, once per event. A meeting that moves is a new thing and is mentioned again. All-day events are never announced, and if the calendar copy is a day old Moe says nothing rather than warn you about a meeting that may since have been cancelled.

Whether Moe may bring up something from one particular source is that source's own switch, Learn from Gmail and watch it, under Keeping up: off, Moe never starts a sentence about it.

The half-hourly pass. With the switch on, every half hour Moe looks at the short brief it keeps of your day, calendar, notes, mail, messages, tasks, and only when the brief has changed asks its thinking part whether anything there matters: your next meeting, a missed call, a message from someone you know. Something worth a word takes the amber glow, one or two sentences; otherwise nothing is said and no thinking is spent. What it learns along the way, a fact about a person, a project, a preference, goes into the memory Moe carries into every conversation. This pass reads the brief and nothing else; no connection is touched, and it has no way to run anything on your Mac.

Open loops. When someone is waiting on you, a question, a request for a call or a decision, an invitation that needs an answer, a deadline you have not acknowledged, Moe does not just mention it once and forget. It keeps a short private note of the thing and comes back to it: about three hours later, then the next morning, then once a day. Each time, it checks your own sent mail and messages first; if you have dealt with it, the note is quietly dropped and you never hear about it again. If you have not, you get one sentence, and only about the most pressing thing, never a list. After four mentions, or a week, Moe lets it go by itself, and nothing can ask to be brought back sooner than an hour. Answer it, "done", "not now", "stop reminding me about that", and it closes, waits, or goes quiet for good. Newsletters, receipts, automated notifications and anything you were only cc'd on are never open loops; a loop is something a person is waiting on you for. For something in your calendar you may not have got ready for, Moe may offer to remind you nearer the time; say yes and it sets the reminder. Moe writes loops down during a conversation too, silently, as they come up: what you said you'd do, what Moe started and should check landed, and a price or a page you looked at that can change, which Moe checks every few minutes without thinking and speaks about only when it moves.

Watches are the same idea for one connection at a time, a data platform, a service, anything you have connected. A watch reads a fixed, declared set of things from that connection on a schedule (what exists, what changed, never rows or records), and when the answer changes asks whether the change is worth a word. The word names the kind of change and never quotes a name, an identifier, or anything the source marks as personal. Nothing ships pre-written: ask Moe to watch a connection and it sets one up; until then the connection's row says so. A watch costs nothing while it is switched off.

Reminders#

Anything you ask Moe to remind you about is said out loud and shown on the island when it comes due. This tab is where a reminder goes besides this Mac. On this Mac is always on. Under it, one row per chat app Moe can message you on, Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack and the rest: tick one and every reminder is sent there too, useful when this Mac is shut. A chat is offered once you have messaged Moe there at least once (that is how Moe knows which chat is yours); until then its row says Connected, but Moe has no chat of yours there yet — message Moe there once, then come back. The first chat app you set up is ticked for you the moment it is ready; a second one waits for you to tick it, and a chat you untick stays unticked. Before you have one, the tab says No chat app to reach you on yet — connect Telegram or WhatsApp under Connections and it appears here.

How reminders themselves behave, and the page that lists them, is Reminders.

When Moe messages you#

When Moe needs to tell you something outside the conversation (a job it finished, something that cannot wait, or because you asked: "message me on Telegram when it's done"), it works out where you are at that moment:

At your Mac (screen unlocked, used in the last few minutes), it shows on the island and your phone stays quiet. If you asked for a chat app in your own words at the Mac ("on Telegram"), it goes there instead. Moe choosing a chat app by itself is not enough, and nor is somebody else asking over a chat.
Away from it, it goes to your own Telegram chat with Moe's bot through Memoe, if Memoe knows which chat is yours, and after that to the chat apps ticked under Reminders above.
Something urgent goes to every one of your chat apps at once. Urgent messages are limited to a few an hour, and never use up the allowance for ordinary ones.
If none of them can be reached, it waits in your inbox on the Mac, and Moe tells you it could not reach you. If Memoe's cloud is slow to answer, Moe says the message may have arrived rather than sending it again.

Where you are is checked when the message goes out, not when you asked. "Text me on Telegram at 5" goes to the island if you are at the Mac at five.

Moe tells you which one it used. Asking twice with the same words does not send it twice, and Moe sends only a handful of these an hour.

Which Telegram chat is yours is known to Memoe's cloud in one of two ways, and it never guesses:

You made your bot with Memoe's Telegram setup. Telegram tells Memoe who made it, and that account is you. This counts only for your first bot. Making another bot later never changes it.
Your account is older, and exactly one person's chat has ever messaged your bot. That chat is yours.

Otherwise Memoe can't tell which chat is yours. Moe then keeps its messages on your Mac (the island and your inbox), plus any chat apps you ticked under Reminders, and Connections › Telegram says Moe can't confirm which Telegram chat is yours yet — messages stay on your Mac.

When Memoe does know, open Connections › Telegram and click Confirm it's you. Memoe shows a short code and your bot's name. Send the code to the bot from that account within ten minutes. The bot tells you whether it worked, and so does the panel. The code only confirms the chat Memoe already knows. It never makes a different chat yours. Someone else's wrong guesses lock out only them, and the bot answers a stranger at most once.

If Moe already reaches you on one chat and you send the code from another, nothing moves yet. Your current chat gets a message with an Allow button that lasts two minutes, and only tapping it there moves the chat. The old chat then gets an Undo button for a day. For now only Telegram works this way.

What this protects against: Moe itself being confused or tricked into messaging someone else, and contacts or strangers who talk to your bot. It does not protect against something that has taken over your Mac and read your bot's token. Anything holding the token can point the bot anywhere. Moving the token off your Mac is separate work.

This only ever reaches you. Moe never messages you through one of your contacts' chats. A routine you ask to "send me on WhatsApp" goes to you, where you are, not to whichever chat that app treats as its default.

Keeping up#

Learn and watch comes first: one switch per connected thing, Learn from Gmail and watch it, Learn from Messages and watch it, and so on. Everything you connect gets a row: the apps on this Mac, and every service you sign into on the Connections page (GitHub, Slack, Notion, Linear and the rest). A row's switch covers everything Moe does with that source by itself:

it keeps it ready, for the apps on this Mac (a service connected through Connections is read when you ask);
it learns from it;
it watches it for things you'd want help with, and for promises;
it mentions what happens there.

Off, Moe reaches that source only when you ask it something. Each row says what it reads, and when Moe last read it back. Background thinking, the daily pass and Let Moe bring things up on its own stay the switches over all of it.

When you're asked. The first time you connect something, Moe asks once: Let Moe learn from Gmail and watch it for things you'd want help with?, with Yes chosen for you and Not now. Not now changes nothing and asks once more a week later; after a second Not now the switch here is the way back. Sources you connected another way, or before this question existed, are asked about together in one question when you next open Memoe. It never comes while another question or sheet is open, and at most once every few hours. Anything you had already said yes to stays on. A source you left unticked in the welcome is asked about again a week later.

Look at what's connected every 10 minutes is on to start with, so Moe knows what is on today when you ask, without going to look first. Its row ends with Last looked: and when. Every ten minutes Moe copies a short window of each source it may learn from and watch into a small cache on this Mac, replaced each time, so "what's on" is instant:

the next three days of your calendar;
the last day of mail, Messages, WhatsApp and Telegram;
the last month of Drive;
every open reminder;
your most recent notes, only while Notes is already open.

Nothing is kept beyond the latest copy, and switching a source off removes its copy. Off, Moe reaches your things only when you ask it something.

Moe always knows what time it is. Every message Moe is given starts with the time where you are — Wednesday 23 September 2026, 6:08 PM (evening), New York time — whether you spoke, typed, or wrote from Telegram or WhatsApp, and on your cloud computer too, in your own time zone. So your calendar reads the way you would read it: what is over today (Wed 23 Sep, 2:00–3:00 PM Project Atlas call — ended 3 h ago), what is on now, and what is coming up (today, in 20 min, tomorrow, on Friday), each with its date — today's included — and its end time, and all-day events as all day rather than a midnight start. Because every event names its own date, a copy of your day read hours later, or by Moe in the cloud, can't mistake today for tomorrow. Something already over is never offered to you as upcoming. Switch a source off and Moe reaches it only when you ask. The apps on this Mac start on; a service connected through Connections is kept ready only once you switch it on here, and then about once an hour, since each read there is a fresh sign-in to the service. Chrome shows here like the others but reads nothing until you have turned it on under Connections.

Before that copy is written, it is read through once for secrets: anything that looks like a password, a PIN, a one-time code, a card number, or the passcode in a meeting link is masked, and if that pass cannot run the copy is not written at all.

Learning about you#

Let Moe think on its own, on my AI plan — on. It lets Moe use your AI plan for work you did not just ask for: the half-hourly look over your mail, calendar and follow-ups, and the daily learning below. Off, none of that is spent. Moe still keeps its follow-up list, still checks a price or a page you asked it to watch (that costs nothing), and still delivers any reminder you set; it just does not think about any of it until you turn this back on. Moe also watches its own budget: on a Claude or ChatGPT plan, past half of your plan's short window (Claude's five-hour window, ChatGPT's session) the background passes wait, your own conversation comes first, and catch up when the window resets; the weekly window only pauses them past four fifths. With an API key there is no window to watch; you pay per token, and this switch is the control.

Quiet hours, 10 pm to 8 am — on. What Moe brings up on its own waits for the morning before it reaches your phone; the notch still gets it, silently, and a reminder you set yourself goes when you said. Moe uses this Mac's own clock and time zone, so it follows you when you travel, and if it has no fresh reading of your zone (the Mac has been off for a day) it holds nothing rather than guess. Switching quiet hours off here switches them off for your cloud computer too.

Once a day, read back over what I've allowed and note what it learns — the daily pass. Off until you say yes, in the welcome or here. Only the things you have said yes to below; it keeps a short list of what it works out, who matters to you, what you're working on, on this Mac, in plain writing you can read and change under Memory. Under the switch, a quieter line says what the pass did last time, Last daily pass, 14 Sep: read Gmail, Calendar, or that it didn't run and why: the switch was off, Let Moe think on its own was off, or your plan was nearly used up, in which case it tries again the next day. When it has waited for your plan several days in a row, that line says so — has waited every day since 12 Oct… so Moe hasn't learned anything new about you since — here and on the Memory page, and nowhere louder.

The daily pass reads only the sources switched on under Learn and watch. The first time you say yes to a source, Moe reads back over it once, a year for most things and three months for browsing. It keeps what it works out as facts, each with where it came from and when. After that it catches up at a pace that suits the source:

daily for mail and messages;
weekly for notes and wikis;
monthly for the shape of a database;
never for a docs search.

A source switched off is skipped, and the others carry on.

For a service connected through Connections, the pass works out for itself what is safe to read: what accounts, projects and structure exist — your repositories and the organisations you belong to, your Slack channels, your mail's labels — never rows of data or documents, and never anything that writes. For a service with messages — Gmail, Outlook, Slack and the like — it also learns from what the messages say, everything in the inbox. It reads them from what Moe already fetched to watch that service, so this costs no extra reads of the service, and each day only what is new since the last pass. Automated mail and notifications are left out, and each conversation is cut to its newest few messages. It learns what matters to you from them; what someone else wrote is never taken as a fact about you. A row says whether Moe worked that out from what the connection offers or you set it yourself, and the list of calls it settled on is a file you can open and trim. A service you have not signed into gets no row: there would be nothing behind it to read.

Keep what it learns as Moe's memory — off. On, what the pass works out becomes part of the memory Moe carries into every conversation, not only a list you can review under Memory. Off, the list is kept and Moe's memory is left alone. See what Moe knows at the foot of the tab opens Memory.

Promises#

Moe keeps track of promises, both ways. It notes the ones you make ("I'll send you the deck by Thursday") and the ones people make to you ("we'll deliver on the 5th"). It finds them wherever it already reads for you:

your chats and mail;
your calendar;
your Apple Notes and recorded calls (only while Notes is open);
the notes of meetings Moe took;
anything you tell Moe in chat, like "I told Dana I'd call her Monday".

Nothing extra is read and there is nothing to set up. Each promise is kept with the exact words it was made in. A vague "let's catch up sometime" is not a promise.

Most promises never reach you. When the deck goes out, in the same chat or by mail, Moe sees it and closes the promise by itself. The same happens when someone says it is no longer needed. Before a promise is brought up, Moe looks once more across everything it reads for a sign it was kept.

When one does, it's on time. A promise with a date comes up at 9 in the morning on the day it's due. If there is still no sign of it the morning after, it comes up again. A promise with a time comes up two hours before and an hour after. One with no date comes up once, a week later. A promise made late on its own due day waits for the next morning rather than coming up at night. One that has been past for two weeks is let go quietly, and never comes up weeks late because your Mac was shut.

What comes up is whatever fits, the same way as anything else Moe noticed:

a reply ready for Dana when your deadline is today;
a polite nudge when someone else's has passed;
the numbers worked out;
or just the promise itself, said plainly, when there is nothing to get ready.

Nothing is ever sent unless you say so and confirm. A promise that came from your own notes or a meeting has no conversation to reply in, so Moe asks you where it should go. Not now or Not this kind of thing on the card works as it does for any offer. Waving a promise's card away also stops Moe watching that promise.

Settings › Running in the background › More › Noticed lists them under Promises: open ones first, soonest due first. Each shows who it's with and where it was made, with the words it was made in. Kept, called-off and let-go ones are shown dimmed for a month. On an Away plan your cloud computer notices promises and sees them kept while your Mac is shut, and both keep one list. Only your Mac brings them up. What either side notices, and what it has already told you, reaches the other within about five minutes: no chat is needed for it to travel.

Activity (the tab)#

What has been running: one row per background job over the last seven days, Speaking up, Learning about you, Calendar heads-up, Watching Notion, with what it did last time (Looked, and there was nothing new to say. / Ran, and had something to do. / The last run didn't finish. Moe will try again on its next turn.), how often it ran and how many of those failed, what it cost in tokens where anything was charged, and on, off or needs a look at the end. A plan you subscribe to has no separate charge, so those lines show the work rather than a price; a key you pay per use is priced from published rates, which is an estimate and not your bill. The fuller record, conversations included, is Activity.

When something Moe runs goes wrong#

Nothing technical is ever put in front of you. Moe runs a handful of jobs in the background, and when one of them does not finish, that is Moe's own plumbing, not news for you. It never takes the amber glow and it is never spoken. Where it does show is here: the job that had trouble reads needs a look, with a plain line saying its last run did not finish and Moe will try again. If something Moe was watching for you genuinely needs you, a connection that has stopped working, an inbox it can no longer read, Moe tells you about it in its own words: what it means for you and what it is doing about it, never an error message.

A job that could not do its work says so — it is never "done". When a scheduled job you asked for runs into something it cannot get past — the browser not signed in where it should be, a login or verification code needed, a page that is not what it expected — it stops, and the report saying why reaches you the way that job's results do: in the chat, on the card under the glow, or wherever you asked for it. The job shows as blocked with that reason, never as having run fine. A job that found nothing new keeps quiet as before; a job that could not look does not.

Jobs you set up yourself run on the same brain your conversation uses. Moe's own background checks stay on the cheapest model your plan offers (Settings › History › Usage says which); a job that acts in your name — posts, follows, books, replies — is not one of those, and gets the brain you chose.

Answering something Moe started#

Anything Moe says on its own, a reminder, a follow-up, a heads-up before a meeting, you can answer in a word, wherever it reached you: the card under the amber glow on this Mac, or Telegram, WhatsApp or any other chat you have picked. "I did." "Not now." "Remind me tomorrow." "Stop reminding me about that." Moe knows which of its own messages you are answering and acts on it, and acting on it never brings up a permission dialog, because changing its own reminders is Moe's own business.

Dealt with — "I did", "done", "sorted". Moe drops the follow-up and never mentions it again.
Later — "not now", "remind me tomorrow", "give me a couple of days". Moe moves it and says nothing until then. Deferring does not use up one of the four times Moe will ever mention something.
Stop — "don't remind me about that any more". Moe drops it and will not raise it again, even if the thing that started it is still sitting unanswered in your mail. Ask for it back and it can come back.
A reminder you set yourself is a schedule rather than a follow-up, so the same words change the schedule: Moe pauses it, deletes it, or moves it to the time you asked for. Moe's own background messages have no schedule of yours behind them, so if you want that kind of message to stop, Moe points you at the switch on this pane rather than quietly deleting the job the rest of them come from.

It only works on the message you have not answered yet, and only for about half a day: a short reply the next morning is a new subject. In a group chat nothing is attached at all; Moe's own messages go to your private chat.