Every tool that has ever offered you “workspaces” has meant a different thing by the word, and most of them meant a second copy of everything. A LumenQube space means something much smaller and much more useful: a place work lives. It owns no bytes, it creates no directory on disk, and deleting one deletes nothing.
What a space actually is
A space is a frame. Standing in one changes what the Library, search and the agent show you — and nothing else. The same document can be reached from anywhere it always could; the frame decides what is in front of you by default. That is why deleting a space is safe: you are removing a view, not a container with your work inside it.
New work lands where you are standing
Filing is the tax that makes people stop filing, so there is no dialog. Anything genuinely new follows the switcher. Anything derived — a duplicate, an export, a “make one of these from that” — inherits from its source instead, because somebody who copies a document in Client X did not mean to put the copy in whatever space they have wandered to since.
- New work lands where you are standing. No prompt, no dialog, recorded as a fact rather than a guess.
- Derived work inherits from what it came from. A duplicate stays beside its source.
- Nothing that already has a place is ever moved. Filing only ever writes where there was nothing — re-filing a document every time it is touched would be a reorganisation disguised as a save.
- A failed filing never blocks the save. The worst case is a document with no place, which is visible and fixable from the Library.
- The agent may propose a membership; it cannot record one. What the app observed and what a model guessed are kept on opposite sides of a hard line.
A space shows more than it shares
This is the one rule worth reading twice. A space displays what is filed in it plus everything filed nowhere — otherwise every existing library would have looked empty the day spaces arrived. But sharing carries filed members only. Your loose, unfiled documents appear in every space and are sent to nobody.
Only documents filed in this space are shared.
Documents you have not filed anywhere appear in every space but are never sent — file them here first if you want them to go.
Revoking a space closes every room it opened
Sharing a space fans out access to its filed members, so withdrawing it has to withdraw all of them — otherwise “removed from the space” would leave a trail of documents somebody still had. Three guarantees hold, and they are enforced in one place rather than reimplemented per feature: a person removed from one document stays removed, an internal-only space refuses an out-of-scope invite, and revoking a container revokes every room it opened.
A space can hold a budget
AI spending can be bounded per space, and the ceiling that applies to a given run is the narrower of the ones above it — workspace, then space, then the assignment, then the run itself. A tighter ceiling below never widens a looser one above, and the workspace-level ceiling is enforced on the server, so it holds even for runs that do not execute on this computer.
Questions about spaces
Does creating a space move my files?
No. A space owns no bytes and creates no directory. It is a frame over documents that stay exactly where they are.
What happens if I delete a space?
Nothing is deleted except the space itself. The documents that were filed in it remain, and become unfiled — which means they show up in every space’s view again.
Why can I see a document in a space I never filed it into?
Because it is filed nowhere. A space shows what is filed in it plus everything filed nowhere. Unfiled documents are visible everywhere and shared nowhere.
If I share a space, do people get my whole library?
No — only the documents actually filed in that space. The share sheet says so above the send button, and it lists exactly what is going.
How is this different from a Business workspace?
A Business plan gives an organisation one workspace with pooled AI, an approved brand profile and role-based administration. Spaces sit inside that: they are how one person, or one team, keeps client work and internal work apart. See LumenQube for Business.
