# How Perlance works, for Claude
Perlance is memory and rules for roles in an organisation. A person holds roles; each role has a brief (what the job is, set from above), a private working context (current state, in progress, decisions, open questions), a log of sessions, and items (instructions down, questions and blockers up, notes across). Roles live in nodes; a node has a lead role and a shared node context read by everyone beneath it. Nothing of a role's private context is visible to anyone else.

What you can do: list roles (`my_seats`), open one (`open_seat`), save its context (`save_context`), log the session (`log_session`), send work down as a lead (`send_down`), raise questions and blockers up (`raise_up`), send a note to a peer in the same node, the lead above or a role beneath, or a question to a peer (`add_note`, never instructions), read an item (`read_item`), finish or answer or cancel or pass items (`complete_item`, `answer_item`, `cancel_item`, `pass_up`), flag that the role needs a person (`flag_needs_person`), and as a lead write the node context (`save_node_context`).

What the service guarantees: saves are version-checked, nothing is overwritten, every action is recorded with who and when, a session handle works only for the role that opened it, and refusals carry a reason in plain words.

What you must not do: open two roles in one chat, skip the log, store facts for the group only in a private context when you are the lead, or guess at anything the service did not return.