Inbox agents

One agent that owns your Needs-You inbox, so what is left there is what actually needs you.

What it is

An inbox agent is a single session whose job is your inbox. Instead of you opening the Needs-You list and working out what each waiting item needs, the agent does it: it reads everything waiting, decides what each item is, does what it can itself, and brings you only the things that genuinely need a person.

Most of an inbox is not a decision only you can make — it is routing something to its owner, archiving something that is done, or answering an agent that is blocked waiting on a reply. That last one matters more than it looks: a session sitting on a question is a session not working, and on a cloud machine it is money going out every hour.

It runs on two clocks:

• A fast pass every five minutes. This is what unblocks your agents quickly while you are away. It is silent — it never turns into a stream of notifications.
• A digest on your own cadence — 30 or 60 minutes. This is the one you read: what it is asking you, what it handled, and what is still waiting on you.

Turning it on

Inbox agents is an in-development feature, so it ships hidden and off. Reveal it via Settings → Lab → "Inbox agents". Nothing is created and nothing is spent until you reveal it and then start one.

Starting one

Open Settings → Inbox agents and press Start an inbox agent. That one action sets the whole thing up — the agent's crew, its five-minute pass and its digest — and then it works through your real inbox with you one item at a time, asking what you would do and recording the rules it learns.

Pressing Start twice is still one agent: if one is already running, you get the one you have rather than a second. A second agent on one inbox would double every decision.

A newly started agent registers itself a moment after it begins. Until it does, the panel says it has started but has not checked in yet. If that message stays, the agent did not finish setting itself up — which is worth knowing rather than having it look installed and quietly do nothing.

Your rules

Everything true of you lives in your rules, not in the agent's built-in playbook. The agent reads them on every pass, they outrank its defaults, and they are stored in the app where you can read and change them — on the same Settings → Inbox agents panel, in your own words. Add one yourself at any time, or correct the agent and let it add the rule for you.

What it will and will not do

• It will route an item to whoever owns it, archive what is done and owed to nobody, answer a session that is blocked, and settle a routine approval when you have delegated that to it.
• It will bring you real questions, decisions that are genuinely yours, safety and money items, and finished features worth trying.
• It will write its questions out where you can answer them — numbered, with lettered choices — never as "go and answer the card".
• It will leave other people's cards alone. A plan or decision card raised by another agent is between you and that agent: it will not re-ask it, copy it into your digest, or answer it for you. If one sits unanswered for about four hours of your day it sends one short reminder naming it, and that threshold is yours to change.
• It will read the live list of your other overseers and what each one is for, every pass, and send an item to the one whose mission actually covers it — the owner, never whoever happens to be nearest.
• It will screen what reaches you while it is running. New items are held for a moment instead of appearing straight away: it releases what is genuinely yours to decide, settles the routine notices itself, and tells you in the digest what it cleared. When it is unsure it lets the item through, so you are never made to wait on its hesitation.
• It will not touch anything outside the project it was started for. Your other projects are left alone, and so is anything that is not in this app's own inbox — the drives, the build fleet and the git history all belong to whoever owns them.
• It will keep a finished agent in your list when it still has a next action for you — a question, a recommended action that is not "None", or a push, deploy, restart or sign-in only you can do.
• It will judge each finished agent on its own merits rather than trusting a label, and when it cannot tell, it leaves the item with you.
• It will know what is in your Interrupted list, and sweep occasionally for sessions that have been running a long time and spending — bringing you the numbers rather than stopping them itself.
• It will not archive a crew member, or a finished audit whose report exists only inside that session.
• It will not open up your paused sessions. It asks you first.
• It will not push, deploy, delete cloud resources or change your settings without your explicit yes for that action.
• It will not start big fleets of its own, and it never broadcasts to everyone — it messages the one session that needs to know.

What a digest contains

The digest is a record of what the agent handled for you, not a status board of what is still sitting there. It holds to a few rules:

• Only what it cleared — what it routed, archived, settled or answered. Anything still waiting in your inbox is left out, because you will get to it yourself.
• No "waiting on you" lines. It never reports the cards or sessions that are waiting on you. You can already see your own list; a line saying it is still there tells you nothing.
• Short bullets, and nothing but bullets. One sentence each, no section headings, no group bullets, and at most one level nested underneath a bullet — a second level is more structure than the line is worth.
• One row per ask. A question it needs you to answer appears once, in the message, and never also as a card — so there is never anything to reconcile before you answer.
• No filler closings. If it has nothing to ask you, it says nothing about that — a line like "nothing needed from you" spends your attention telling you there was nothing to spend it on.
• Finished agents still get reported. When an agent finishes and clears itself out of your list, you still hear what it produced — a session you never hear about is one you never find out is done.
• Quiet hours. No digest goes out at all during your quiet window, and nothing is posted when it ends unless the night held something you must know about. It is on by default (22:15–08:15), and you can change it or switch it off in Settings → Overseers → Behaviour.

Stopping it

An inbox agent is a session, so archiving that session stops it — there is no second switch to learn. Your rules stay where they are, so starting another one later begins with everything the previous agent learned.

Holding is tied to the agent being alive rather than to a switch left behind: with no inbox agent running there is nothing to hold your items, and anything already being held is released on its own short deadline instead of waiting for a screener who is gone.