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Inbox and triage

The inbox is a pressure-release valve: capture a thought now, decide what to do with it later. This keeps the daily loop friction-free — you never have to stop and classify something mid-flow.

Capture

cdno capture "does Chen 2025 use the same preconditioner?"
cdno capture "ask IT about the cluster quota"

Each capture becomes a small slug-named note in inbox/. That’s the whole cost — no fields, no decisions. Capture liberally.

Triage

When you have a moment (a natural fit for the weekly review), process the inbox:

cdno triage

Interactively, triage walks each pending capture and offers, for each one, to:

  • keep it as a project action — turn it into a next action on a project, or
  • discard it — it served its purpose, or
  • skip it — leave it for next time.

Run non-interactively (or with --no-interactive), triage just lists what’s pending — a quick way to see the backlog without acting on it.

A healthy inbox is empty-ish

The inbox is a transit point, not a filing cabinet. The goal isn’t zero at all times — it’s that nothing important lives only there. Anything worth keeping becomes an action, a piece of evidence, a question, or a log line; the rest gets discarded without ceremony.

With Claude

The MCP tools capture, triage_inbox (lists pending items), and discard_inbox_item let an assistant capture on your behalf and help you clear the backlog conversationally.

Next: Searching your vault.