Multiple workspaces 🪟¶

The same layers can feed more than one workspace, and each workspace sees only the layers it declared. This is what makes a workspace a context — personal, work, one per project — rather than one global pile.

Two targets, two layer lists 🗂️¶

Each workspace is a directory with its own sources.txt:

~/.ai-resources/          # the default: personal + shared
  sources.txt
~/work/.ai-resources/     # work context: organization + client
  sources.txt

# ~/work/.ai-resources/sources.txt
~/ai/personal
$WORK/ai-platform
$WORK/client-acme

Serve them independently — they are separate processes and separate mounts:

airfs mount --detach
airfs mount --detach --target ~/work/.ai-resources

Layers are shared without either workspace seeing the other's. ~/ai/personal is read by both; neither can write to it.

Every command takes --target, so the rest follows:

airfs status  --target ~/work/.ai-resources
airfs sources --target ~/work/.ai-resources
airfs umount  --target ~/work/.ai-resources

Trying a layer list without committing to it 🧪¶

--target and --config are independent: overriding the config does not move the target. Two useful shapes fall out of that.

Try an alternative list against a scratch target — leaves your real workspace untouched:

mkdir -p /tmp/try
airfs sources --target /tmp/try --config ./experiment.txt
airfs mount   --target /tmp/try --config ./experiment.txt --detach
ls /tmp/try/skills
airfs umount  --target /tmp/try

Rebuild your usual workspace from a different list — same place, different layers, when you want to check what a proposed change to sources.txt would actually serve:

airfs umount
airfs mount --config ~/ai/proposed-sources.txt --detach

Remember that relative paths inside a config file resolve against that file's directory. ./experiment.txt above declares its layers relative to the directory holding experiment.txt, not relative to /tmp/try and not relative to your shell — which is exactly what lets you keep an experimental list next to the repositories it names.

Answering "which workspace am I looking at?" 🧭¶

airfs sources prints both paths before anything else:

target  /home/you/work/.ai-resources
config  /home/you/work/.ai-resources/sources.txt

Worth checking first whenever a result surprises you, because the most common cause of "my edit did nothing" is having inspected a different workspace than the one your tooling is reading.

One process per workspace 🔢¶

Each airfs mount serves exactly one target, with its four mounts. Nothing is shared between workspaces at runtime and nothing coordinates them; stopping one has no effect on another. Mount state lives only in the kernel, so airfs status against a target is always answering about that target alone.