BrainCue

19 · One profile at a time

Status: design of record, 2026-07-28. Activities: 18-ACTIVITIES.md · Spaces & profile: 17-SPACES-AND-PROFILE.md · Continuity: 16-CONTINUITY.md.

1. Five pickers for one fact

“Whose dashboard is this?” was asked separately by every profile-scoped surface: the Library’s Spaces, Documents, and Memory tabs, the start modal, and the Interview, Mock, and Sparring pages. Each carried the same three lines —

const [profileId, setProfileId] = useState('');
useEffect(() => { if (!profileId && profiles.length) setProfileId(profiles[0].id) }, …);
<Select value={profileId} …>

— and each defaulted independently. Nothing tied them together, so they could disagree: you could be reading one person’s Spaces while the start modal was primed to run a session as someone else. The user never gets told which answer won.

The profile is now chosen once, in the sidebar, above the nav — so the scope of everything below it is visible while you use it, rather than re-asked per page. ProfileSwitcher is the only picker; “+ New profile…” sits in the same menu, because both answer the same question and splitting them would put the rarer action in the bigger target.

2. Where it lives, and why in main

AppSettings.activeProfileId (settings key active_profile_id) — persisted, so it survives a restart, and resolved in main so every window agrees, including the Cue Card, which has no picker of its own.

A stored id is a pointer, and pointers dangle: profiles get deleted, databases get restored, the setting outlives the row it names. resolveActiveProfile (shared/activeProfile.ts) therefore validates against the real rows on every read and falls back to a profile that exists.

A dangling id must never blank the app. Every list is scoped by this one value, so a stale pointer would empty all of them at once — and “empty” is indistinguishable from “broken”. null is returned only when there are genuinely no profiles, which is exactly the signal the first-run gate needs.

3. First run is a question, not an empty app

With no profile, every surface rendered as an empty list behind a picker with nothing in it. That reads as a broken install rather than as “start here”.

NewProfileModal with dismissable={false} now covers the app until a profile exists — no Escape, no Cancel, because there is nothing behind it to go back to.

It asks for a name and nothing else. Everything else about a person — what they do, who they work with, how they want to be helped — lives in the profile editor (17 §2) and is optional there. Demanding it before the app has done anything for them is how the old onboarding turned into a job application.

The same component is the switcher’s “New profile…”, dismissable.

4. Home says the name

Hi {first name} — how can I help right now?

Not decoration: it is the visible proof of which profile the whole page is scoped to. A dashboard scoped by an invisible setting is a dashboard you cannot trust.

5. Two kinds of nav

Once the profile scopes the app, the sidebar’s entries stop being one list:

Group	Entries	What it is
(labelled with the active profile’s name)	Home, Library, Sessions, Insights	views of ONE person; every one changes when the switcher changes
App	Profiles, Settings	about the app, or about the set of people; does not move when you switch

Running them together made the switcher look like it scoped Settings too, and hid that the four above it are all views of whoever is selected. The first group’s label is the profile’s own name — the plainest available statement of what changes when you switch.

6. The Library stops being two things

Library › Profile listed every profile, created them, and deleted them — sitting beside three tabs that each showed exactly one profile’s things. So the Library answered both “what does BrainCue know about you?” and “which you?”. Those are different questions and they now have different homes:

which you → the sidebar switcher;
the set of people → /profiles, a global page in the App group;
who you are → the profile editor at /profiles/:id;
what it knows about the active one → the Library (Spaces, Documents, Memory), default tab Spaces.

Sample data has to survive the gate

“Load sample data” lived only on that tab. With the first-run modal covering the whole app until a profile exists, the one page offering it sat behind the very gate you could not pass — so a fresh install could no longer try the app with sample data at all. The modal offers it directly.

7. Scoping the data, not just the chrome

Two pages were still reading the whole database while claiming to be part of a profile-scoped app:

Sessions listed every session ever recorded, including other people’s conversations.
Insights aggregated the same list, so its practice trend and per-competency averages mixed two people’s rehearsals into numbers that described neither.

Both were invisible while there was one profile and wrong the moment there were two. sessionsRepo.list and practiceStats take the profile now; the parameter stays optional only for the data-stats caller, which genuinely means everything.

8. What did NOT change

Profiles remain the unit of ownership. Spaces, sessions, chunks, and memories were always keyed by profile_id; this changes who is selected, not what belongs to whom.
Settings stays global. It always was; it just no longer sits in a list that implies otherwise.
No migration. A setting, not a column.

This site is open source. Improve this page.