HTTP is the best control plane

A message has three places. A status line for what happened. Headers for what the message is. A body for the payload. Thirty years of software already reads those three places: proxies, caches, logs, rate limiters, your terminal.

AI APIs put the method in one JSON field, the role in another, the content in a third, and send the whole thing over HTTP. HTTP inside JSON inside HTTP. The moment a header hides inside prose, every tool on the wire goes blind.

Ask a model to answer as an HTTP response and it does, with headers nobody taught it: X-Verdict, X-Confidence, X-Scope. It learned the shape from the web. The envelope was always there. The API swallowed it; curldb keeps it.

Prose in, structure out. Not JSON.

You ask in plain words. The answer comes back with a status line and headers. That is structure without a schema: no fields you had to define first, no parser to keep in sync. A header like X-Confidence: 0.8 already means something to every reader that knows HTTP, models included. Store the message and the headers are the index; nothing had to be extracted.

HTTP already has a place for the verb, the resource, and the outcome. Putting them inside the payload again gives you the oldest joke on the wire:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{"status": 404, "error": "not found"}

Every proxy, cache, and log on the way saw a success. Only the parser at the far end knows it failed. The status line was right there, unused.

tee

The conversation stays on your screen. tee sends a copy to curldb. Close the terminal; the copy is still there.

$ claude 'how do I design a REST API for a todo app?' | tee /dev/tty | curldb add
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Scope: design
X-Confidence: 0.8

Nouns, not verbs. /todos and /todos/42. POST creates, PATCH edits, DELETE removes. Let status codes carry the outcome.
#1 200 +2 headers

$ claude 'latest news on Rust async?' | tee /dev/tty | curldb add
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Scope: news
X-Confidence: 0.6

Async closures stabilised. The runtime story is unchanged: pick one, stay on it.
#2 200 +2 headers

$ curldb query 'header:X-Scope=design'
      1  09-11 11:13   200   Nouns, not verbs. /todos and /todos/42. POST creates

$ curldb tags
  X-Scope: design(1) news(1)
  X-Confidence: 0.8(1) 0.6(1)

Each reply prints as usual and lands in curldb with a number. Nothing was parsed on the way in; the headers the model wrote are the index. Query by status, any header, or full text of the body.

Four rules

One session, one file

The file name is the session. Backup is cp. Searching across sessions is querying each file in turn.

Headers are tags

No schema. X-Verdict: shaky is unreadable to a program and obvious to a model, so an unknown header is fine. curldb tags lists what exists; the vocabulary grows out of the data.

The body is never touched

Whoever adds headers, you, the model, an annotating model, a hook, adds headers only. Annotators sign with Via:.

The server is a cabinet

Every stored message gets a number; a POST answers with it in Location. GET /2 returns message 2 exactly as it was stored, as message/http. A stored reply is data; it is never replayed as the server's own answer. Localhost, no token, one CLI.

Where the messages come from

Nobody types HTTP. People speak in prose; machines add the envelope.

The model answers in HTTP because its system prompt asks it to. Your own words get wrapped on the way in: a small model on a tee branch reads what you typed and writes the headers, X-Topic, X-Intent, whatever fits, without touching a word of the body. Tool calls need no model at all; a hook translates them mechanically, POST /tool/Read with JSON args, a response with the result. Markdown notes with YAML front matter are header plus body already.

One turn of a conversation, one file, one index over all of it: what was said, what was decided, which tool failed, which conclusion did not hold.

pip install curldb