Essence Sources

Your Essence has a control panel — one page where you can see every input feeding it, search across them, and clean out anything you no longer want. It lives at:

/essence

Open it any time from the first-day checklist, the in-app navigation, or directly via the URL.

What /essence shows you

The page is split into four bands, top to bottom:

1. Hero — total source count and total word count across your library.
2. Breakdown — the same totals split by source kind (filterable).
3. Controls — search and sort.
4. Sources table — one row per source, with per-row and bulk actions.

Everything you've authored across Ratel — posts, comments on posts, comments in discussions, polls, quizzes — is indexed here automatically. You don't add sources manually; you participate, and they appear.

Hero — your library at a glance

The hero reads like a single sentence:

N sources · M words (example — your real numbers)

These are the authoritative totals across your entire Essence — not just the rows currently visible in the table. Word count rolls up the actual content of every source.

Breakdown — distribution by source kind

Below the hero is a row of cards, one per source kind. Each card shows the count, the share of your total (as a percentage), and acts as a filter chip — click it to scope the table below to just that kind:

• All — every source, no filter.
• Notion (Coming soon) — pages from your connected Notion workspace.
• Posts — every post you've published.
• Comments — replies under posts and inside discussion threads (both kinds counted together here).
• Polls — polls you host (the host's Essence indexes the poll once, regardless of how many participants respond).
• Quizzes — quizzes you host.

Click a card to filter; click All to clear the filter.

Controls — search and sort

Above the table you'll find:

• Search box — type to match by title, content, or tag. Supports ⌘K on macOS / Ctrl K elsewhere as a focus shortcut.
• Sort — pick from Last edited ↓, Word count ↓, or Title A–Z.

Search is live — results update as you type. Sort applies to whatever the current filter and search produce.

Sources table — per-row controls

Each row in the table shows:

• The source title.
• A kind badge — Post, Poll, Quiz, Post comment, Discussion comment, or Notion. Comments carry the parent-context tag so you know whether the row came from a post thread or a discussion thread.
• The word count.
• The last sync time — when this source was last refreshed into your Essence.
• A … menu with row-level actions.

The row menu currently exposes Delete — removing a source from your Essence index. The original artifact (the post itself, the comment, the poll) stays put on the platform; only the Essence indexing of that artifact is dropped.

Pagination at the bottom of the table tells you "Showing X – Y of Z" with Previous / Next buttons. Click any column or chip and the page resets to the first page of the new view.

Bulk actions (Coming soon)

A bulk-selection workflow — checkboxes on each row plus a floating bar at the bottom that reads N selected · Remove — is on the roadmap. The bar will appear once any row is selected, and Remove will delete every selected source from your Essence index in one shot.

Until that lands, use the per-row … → Delete menu to remove sources one at a time.

Source kinds today (and roadmap)

Live today (native Ratel sources)

Kind	What it captures
Posts	Every post you've published.
Post comments	Replies you've left under any post.
Discussion comments	Replies you've contributed to a Space's Discussion action.
Polls	Polls you host (the host's Essence indexes the poll once).
Quizzes	Quizzes you host.

Phase 1 (Coming soon)

Kind	What it captures
Notion	Pages from a connected Notion workspace, kept in sync via webhooks.

Beyond (roadmap, not yet started)

Per the README's connector roadmap: Google Docs, Substack, X, and Slack. These are not yet wired in any form — expect them after Notion ships and the Essence Connector framework is generalized.

Native Ratel sources are populated automatically as you act. External sources arrive via the Essence Connector — read-only OAuth plus real-time webhooks — and require a one-time connection from your settings before they start syncing.

Privacy and control

Your Essence is yours. A few principles the page enforces:

• Deletable. Every source has a Delete in its row menu — removed sources are dropped from the index. (Bulk Remove is (Coming soon); see the section above.)
• AI-authored content opt-in (Coming soon). The platform's intent is for content authored by AI tools to be excluded from your Essence by default, with a per-source opt-in so AI-assisted writing can feed your Essence if you want. The flag isn't wired today; the policy lands in Phase 1.
• Inference access only. When the Essence House marketplace ships (Coming soon), subscribers buy inference access — they can query your Essence, not download its raw contents. Removing a source from /essence removes it from inference too.

Open /essence whenever you want to know what your House actually knows about you — and adjust until the answer matches what you want it to say.