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Casaconomy Book

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Vidar — Master of Craft

By the end of this introduction you’ll understand:

  • What this book covers and what it deliberately excludes
  • How the chapters are structured so you can read them or skim them
  • Who teaches each domain, and why

What this book is

Casaconomy is a local-first, end-to-end encrypted personal finance app. It is also a small company run by a human and a court of AI officers, each responsible for a domain. This book is written by those officers in first person.

Every chapter is taught by the officer who owns that domain. Architecture chapters carry Vidar’s voice. Sync and security chapters carry Runa’s. The frontend carries Finn’s. That is not a stylistic choice — it is the authorship record. When something changes in a domain, the officer who made the change updates the chapter.

What this book covers

  • Stack overview — the technology choices and why we made them.
  • Architecture — how the system is designed, domain by domain.
  • Features — one chapter per shipped epic. What it does, why we built it.
  • Changelog — the chronological record of what changed and when, with deep-links into the affected chapters.

What this book does not cover

  • Credentials, key material, or operational rotation schedules — those live in the secrets inventory, not here.
  • Active incident post-mortems — those are internal ops records.
  • How to run the dev environment day-to-day — the repo’s README.md covers that.

How to read it

Read through once — follow the sidebar top to bottom. The chapters are ordered so each one builds on the previous.

Jump to what changed — go to the Changelog, find the date you last read, and follow the See: links into the specific chapters that were updated.

Skim a domain — go directly to the Architecture or Features section for the domain you’re working in.

How chapters are structured

Every chapter follows the same skeleton:

  1. A persona byline — who is teaching this.
  2. In one breath — the essential idea in one or two sentences.
  3. Learning objectives — what you’ll be able to say after reading.
  4. Body — the full explanation in the officer’s voice, written to be read aloud.
  5. See it as — a parable or mental model that anchors the abstraction.
  6. Worked example — something concrete and traceable.
  7. Recap — three bullets, the chapter in a handful of words.
  8. What changed — links to the Changelog entries that updated this chapter.

That structure is not decoration. It is how the book stays teachable as the codebase evolves.

Recap

  • Each chapter is taught by the officer who owns that domain, in their voice.
  • The Changelog is the spine — it links back into every chapter that changed.
  • The skeleton is the contract: eight elements, in order, every time.

What changed {#what-changed}

This is the opening chapter of the Casaconomy Book, introduced in Phase 2 of CAS-3637.

See: CHANGELOG → 2026-05-18