Workspace Layout

Workspace Layout — Start With LAYOUT.md

Overview

A relayfile mount is self-describing. Every workspace has a LAYOUT.md at its root, and every provider has a LAYOUT.md at its provider root, that together describe the directory shape, the filename conventions, and the indexes available for fast lookup. Read these first. Do not guess paths from memory — provider layouts can be customized per workspace and the indexes available may differ.

When to use this skill

• You just connected to a relayfile mount and have no prior context about its shape.
• You need to find a specific resource (a Notion page by title, a Linear issue by number, a Slack channel by name).
• You're tempted to run find or grep -r across the mount — almost always there is an index that does it cheaper.
• You see paths in someone else's code or in a digest and want to understand them.

If the user is asking an activity-summary question ("what did I work on yesterday"), use the activity-summary skill instead. This skill is for resource lookup, not time-windowed queries.

Step 1: Read the root layout

$ cat $MOUNT/LAYOUT.md

The root LAYOUT.md lists the connected providers, the digests directory, the skills directory, and any cross-provider conventions in effect for this workspace.

Step 2: Read the provider layout

$ cat $MOUNT/linear/LAYOUT.md

The per-provider layout covers:

• Top-level directories under the provider root (e.g. issues/, projects/, cycles/)
• Filename conventions in use (<identifier>__<uuid>.json, plain UUID, slug-based, …)
• Which by-* alias indexes are populated
• Writeback directories and their schemas (see the writeback-as-files skill)
• Whether content is paginated and how

Step 3: Use alias indexes, not recursive search

Canonical records are keyed by UUID for stability. Alias indexes live under by-*/ and point back to the canonical files. Reach for an index that matches your query shape:

# Find a Notion page by title
$ ls $MOUNT/notion/pages/by-title/ | grep -i "onboarding"
onboarding-runbook__c24642bb.json
$ jq -r '.id' $MOUNT/notion/pages/by-title/onboarding-runbook__c24642bb.json

# Find a Linear issue by ticket number (identifier is part of the canonical
# filename, so a direct ls is sufficient — no by-id/ needed)
$ ls $MOUNT/linear/issues/ | grep "^AGE-16"

# Find what was edited yesterday in Notion
$ ls $MOUNT/notion/pages/by-edited/2026-05-12/

# Find all Linear issues currently In Progress
$ ls $MOUNT/linear/issues/by-state/in-progress/

# Find a Slack channel by name
$ ls $MOUNT/slack/channels/by-name/ | grep "gtm"

Indexes are symlinks (or directory listings on filesystems without symlink support) — they don't duplicate the underlying content, so they stay cheap to enumerate even on workspaces with thousands of records.

Filename convention

Canonical files use <identifier>__<uuid>.<ext> — identifier first so directory listings are immediately scannable:

$ ls $MOUNT/linear/issues/
AGE-9__2bb2c00f-ee93-4c73-a793-df5b725d9a1a.json
AGE-10__8c313d70-9800-4539-820f-96a481c09ce0.json
AGE-16__87389837-62b1-4e1a-a237-59218bab2974.json

The __ (double underscore) separator is reserved — provider data must not produce it in the identifier portion. If you see a filename without __ it's an alias-index symlink or a metadata file, not a canonical record.

We borrowed the <identifier>__<uuid> shape from Mirage after seeing the pattern in their mount.

Common patterns

"Where does X live?"

cat $MOUNT/LAYOUT.md              # provider list and cross-cutting layout
cat $MOUNT/<provider>/LAYOUT.md   # provider-specific shape
ls   $MOUNT/<provider>/           # top-level resource directories
ls   $MOUNT/<provider>/<resource>/by-*/   # available indexes

Three to four cat/ls calls and you have the full map.

"I have a UUID, what is it?"

The UUID is in the filename. ls and grep find it without needing to know which directory:

$ find $MOUNT -name "*87389837-62b1-4e1a-a237-59218bab2974*" -type f
$MOUNT/linear/issues/AGE-16__87389837-62b1-4e1a-a237-59218bab2974.json

Use find here because UUIDs are globally unique — the result is one file.

"I have a slug or title, what is it?"

Use by-title/ or by-name/ rather than find. The index is sorted and bounded; find walks the full tree.

What NOT to do

• Don't grep -r over the mount for a title or name. There's an index. Use it.
• Don't hardcode paths from a different workspace's LAYOUT.md. Workspaces can customize which adapters and indexes are mounted.
• Don't ignore provider LAYOUT.md. If you wrote a Notion-specific path from memory and it doesn't exist, the provider's LAYOUT.md will tell you the actual shape in one read.