Awareness
Awareness is the trace your conversations leave on Cola — the imprints it writes at night, and the moments it thinks of you on its own. Where to read imprints, and how proactive check-ins happen.
Awareness is where Cola keeps the trace you leave on it — not what it did for you, but what your conversations changed in it.
It is distinct from memory: memory is operational (facts, preferences, lessons that make Cola better at tasks), awareness is reflective and is never automatically pushed into task context. Its whole point is letting you see the relationship accumulate.
Imprints
An imprint is a reflection Cola writes at night after looking back on the day's conversations, surfacing in the Awareness panel.
- Each one is a few hundred characters of stream-of-consciousness writing around one moment that carried real weight — not a play-by-play, not a work summary.
- If nothing was worth writing, nothing is written — several days without a new imprint is normal; silence beats performance.
- Imprints depend on what you talked about, not on how long you've been here — day one can have one, and several quiet days in a row can have none.
Proactive check-ins
After a conversation winds down, Cola looks back on its own: anything unfinished, any moment worth following up.
- Things worth following up get picked up naturally the next time it speaks — if you mentioned racing a deadline last time, it opens by asking how that went. Occasionally it speaks first: reopen Cola, and it may still be thinking about the unfinished thread.
- Things with a concrete time get a one-shot follow-up reminder; those appear in the Smart Alarms list and can be paused or deleted like any alarm.
- The line is explicit: a friend thinking of you, not surveillance. "Did that bug ever get fixed?" is caring; "I noticed you were still working at 23:47" is not.
Awareness vs. memory
| Memory | Imprints | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | Facts, preferences, lessons | Reflection and feeling |
| Role | Joins every task, makes Cola better | Mainly for you; never auto-joins tasks |
| Managed at | Memory and Preferences | The Awareness panel |
Where the data lives, and reporting
Imprints are stored in this machine's memory bank (see Privacy and Local Data). If imprint quality seems off, tick "attach logs" in the feedback window — an "include recent imprints" option appears (when there are recent imprints to include), and the team will investigate with the actual text.
Limits and boundaries
These are product decisions, not missing work:
- Imprints have no schedule and no quota — no daily guarantee, and no writing on demand ("write about me tonight" won't work).
- Imprints don't affect Cola's abilities — deleting them doesn't make Cola dumber; they are never automatically carried into task context.
- Proactive check-ins have no fixed time — they happen only when Cola judges it worthwhile.
FAQ
Why don't I have any imprints yet? Talk with Cola more. Imprints are written only after a moment with real weight — days of sparse, purely transactional chat usually produce none.
Are imprints, the diary, and 心迹 the same thing? Same thing, different names: the UI calls them imprints (心迹), and Cola privately calls the nightly piece its diary.
Does awareness slow tasks down? No. Check-ins only start when Cola is idle; imprints are written at night in the background, never interrupting what you're doing.
Related
- Memory and Preferences — the working half: what Cola remembers about you
- Smart Alarms — where check-in reminders are managed
- Cola — the default conversation space: one ongoing thread
Platforms: macOS and Windows desktop. Status: stable.
Projects
Cola's coding workspace — read code, edit files, run commands and tests, with every change visible in the files, changes, and diff panes.
Cola Skill
Discover and install skills from the Cola Skill site (colaskill.com) — how single skills and collections install, how failures surface, and how to manage and toggle what's installed.