First step of M304. Additive on its own — nothing calls this yet — so it can be read and tested before anything depends on it. A checklist is currently a TABLE, and a table can only ever render after the body, because a row has no idea where in the note it belongs. That is why "inline with the note" is not a styling problem: prose, three checkboxes, then more prose is not expressible at all today. derive.rs already owns "structure derived from body text" for #tags and says so in its module doc. Task lines join it rather than opening a second home for the same idea. The difference between the two is worth stating and now is: tags MATERIALISE into label rows because the board queries by label; items materialise into nothing, because nothing queries them. Their only readers are the card, the editor, and display_title. The grammar is fixed here because three languages will implement it — derive.rs, notes/checklist.py, notes/markdown.ts — and any difference between two of them is a checklist that changes shape when it syncs. `*` is accepted since markdown.ts already takes it for a plain bullet, and a rule that allowed `* item` but not `* [ ] item` would be one nobody could guess. `- [ ]` with nothing after it parses as an empty item: that is what pressing Enter on a list leaves behind, and refusing it would make a half-typed list stop being a list. `- [X]` parses and normalises to lowercase on the first rewrite, so round trips are stable. append_item spaces its output exactly as import_export.py:_note_markdown does. That is not cosmetic — the server migration will fold existing rows into bodies with the same layout, so an export taken before it and one taken after have to agree byte for byte. A stale index is inert rather than fatal: the index comes from a UI that may be a moment behind the store, and a late tap should do nothing rather than panic.