nsnswewe

N S N S W E W E: a compass needle swinging before it settles. Install nsnswewe, then type strategy.

Your strategy as data — four things, and only four. See it, look at one position and its case, decide on it, add one. The same four on a small web page, on the command line and over MCP.

MIT licensed. Runs entirely on your machine, against SQLite or Postgres.

Why so small

Teams decide things constantly and then lose them: the decision lives in a task title, a closed issue, a doc from March, and six weeks later it is re-argued from scratch. A strategy you can see on one page is one you can check work against. Simple is explainable; this does the explainable part.

The four things

The strategy is laid out in the five boxes of Playing to Win (Lafley & Martin): winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities, management systems. A position is one claim in one box. It is undecided until you adopt it (I hold this) or reject it (I do not, and here is why); either is dated. What backs it is its evidence: notes of what was actually observed, each saying which way it cuts — supports, opposes, or complicates.

Several strategies in one store. A cascade is the five boxes for one project, or for one pass at the same question. Create, rename and delete them on the Cascades page, with strategy cascade create|list|show|rename|delete, or with the MCP tools cascade_list, cascade_create, cascade_rename and cascade_delete. The strategy page has a dropdown to show one (and, when some positions are in no cascade, "Unassigned positions", also --cascade -); strategy list --cascade KEY and the list tool's cascade do the same, and add into a cascade puts the new position in it. Deleting a cascade never deletes a position.

The CLI also does the housekeeping: strategy init, strategy export, strategy import, and strategy web to serve the pages.

Every surface reads through queries.py and writes through core.py, so they cannot disagree: adopting dates the position, a rejection must carry a reason, a position must name one of the five boxes.

Quick start

uv tool install 'nsnswewe[web,mcp]'   # → strategy, strategy-mcp (and nsnswewe, the same as strategy)
strategy init                  # SQLite at ~/.strategy/store.db, or set STRATEGY_DB_URL
strategy add --title "Sell to teams, not individuals" --box "where to play"
strategy list
strategy web                   # http://127.0.0.1:8021

To try it without installing: uvx nsnswewe init, then uvx nsnswewe list.

From a clone of this repo, uv tool install '.[web,mcp]' does the same as the install line.

For a chat client, run strategy-mcp (stdio). It has the four things and no housekeeping.

Configuration

Settings are read from the process environment first, then ~/.env, then the default. ${PART}-style references in those files resolve the way a shell would; a reference nothing defines drops the key with a line on stderr rather than leaving half a connection string.

If STRATEGY_DB_URL is set and cannot be opened, the CLI fails and says so. It never quietly falls back to the local SQLite copy.

Your positions are not in this repository. They name real commitments and real people, and live in your store.

The web page

Four pages (the strategy, a position, add, cascades) and /health, bound to loopback with no login. Writes are form posts that go through core; a cross-origin post is refused.

Publishing hygiene

scripts/check_publishable.py fails on real Vikunja task ids, patent numbers, or terms from a private list kept outside the repo (STRATEGY_PRIVATE_TERMS; plain substrings, or re: lines for patterns). tests/test_publishable.py runs the same check in the suite.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Pinned to Python 3.12 by .python-version.