The plan I had wrong
My Control Plane needed an Instructions page. It had to show runbooks, handovers between Claude sessions, manuals, checklists and how-tos as one kind of thing. The plan Claude and I started with was to give them a kind and an instructions folder in each area, so the page could find them by looking in those folders.
Then Claude asked whether it should convert the 110 runbooks I had then to the new form, or list them read-only next to it. I answered with a rule: everything is a note with properties. Changing how the app shows a type of note does not change the vault. A runbook stays in the area it belongs to, and a handover stays in the day folder of the session it closed.
The mistake was mine as much as Claude's. I had let the folder decide what a note is. The properties decide it.
What the page does instead
A note is an instruction because of what it says about itself. type: runbook, how-to, manual, checklist, guide or recipe makes one. A note of type: instruction names its own kind. A debrief with the right file name is a handover.
Those rules are one block of configuration, one row per kind. The page asks the vault index for notes that match. 274 came back on the day I built it (the index now counts 115 runbooks, five more than the 110 I started with): 115 runbooks, 135 handovers, 7 manuals, 7 guides, 6 checklists and 4 how-tos. The runbooks sit in operations, security, travel, assets, system and learning. The handovers sit in day folders. No note was moved.
What it saves
A change of layout became an edit to one row of configuration. Templates joined the app a week later as one row and a list of rules. A handover kind took six lines. The 110 runbooks, and every script that reads their paths, never had to be touched.