A guide so that partners can run our decision loop themselves

The situation

We had built a small reference example for Databox partners: a decision loop on top of Databox. It records each decision with its premise and a review date, then reviews it on that date. It is plain files: six skills, templates and a worked Google Ads example.

What it looked like

What was missing was a guide: how partners run it under Claude, Cowork and Claude Code, connect it to Databox, and use it in daily work.

What was actually true

Databox has one hosted connection address. Partners sign in with their own login, so no key sits in a file. In Cowork, a connector counts only when its tools are present in the session, and scheduled jobs run only while the app is open. So the guide tells partners to put review dates in a real calendar.

How we found it

We checked rather than wrote from memory: we called the connection live, and our accounts came back. The first draft read as demanding. Asked for "a kind of ramp up", we made it open with five steps, each useful on its own. The first takes ten minutes: one question to Databox. We removed every name of our internal systems and searched the files to confirm it.

What changed

The result was a twelve-section guide, in the files and as a web page. We also built a 48-file archive that includes the brief the example was generated from, so partners can make their own variant. And we wrote a brief for a password-protected page on our site.

Where it ended

The guide and the archive are finished, and the archive tested clean. The page is not built. The guide’s web page is still private, which the page brief treats as a launch blocker. Five decisions are still ours, the password among them.

What we did not claim

The guide calls the loop a lightweight reference example, not a production decision engine: no causal inference, no statistical testing, no data validation, no automation.

Why it matters beyond this case

Handing somebody a connection is easy. Handing them one they can work without us standing behind it is not.

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