Inbox backlog nudge (a reminder to archive when sessions pile up)

What it is

When a stack of sessions has been waiting for you for days and you're still working but not clearing them, Omniscio drops one gentle inbox card a day suggesting you archive what you're done with. It's a nudge toward the archive habit — so your inbox doesn't quietly grow to hundreds of stale items. It runs entirely on your machine, uses no AI (so it costs nothing), and is capped at one card per day.

It never fires on a busy day of fresh items you're actively clearing: the trigger is quantity and age, not a raw count, plus a check that you're active but not already archiving.

Where to find it

It arrives on its own as a card in your inbox — there is nothing to open. The switch that silences it for good is Settings → Notifications → Inbox backlog nudges, and the card itself carries a Turn off these nudges button that flips the same setting.

How it behaves

When it appears

The card appears only when all of these are true at once (checked about every 30 minutes):

• A real, aged backlog — at least 15 sessions needing your attention (Needs You / Error / Stalled) that have been waiting 3+ days. Fresh items and snoozed items don't count.
• You're actually working — you've sent a message to a session in the last 24 hours, so it never nags you while you're away, even if agents are still running in the background.
• You're not already archiving — fewer than 3 manual archives in the past week. If you're clearing your inbox, there's nothing to nudge.

If you clear the backlog, today's card removes itself.

How to use it

• Archive what you're done with. The very sessions it's about are right there in your inbox — archive from the row or with the archive control in the session header.
• Don't want these? Click Turn off these nudges on the card, or use Settings → Notifications → Inbox backlog nudges. Turning Tips & Guidance off silences it along with every other hint.

Settings

Settings → Notifications:

• Inbox backlog nudges (inboxBacklogNudgeEnabled, default on).

The thresholds (15 items, 3+ days, once a day) are fixed sensible defaults — there's nothing to tune.

For agents

How it works

• A small background checker (registered as a leaf startup task) runs every ~30 minutes. It reads three local signals — the aged-backlog count, your most recent session message time, and your recent manual-archive count — and a pure evaluator decides whether to raise.
• "Not archiving" is a simple floor: fewer than 3 session_archive_via_button / session_archive_via_shortcut events in the last 7 days.
• The daily card is deduplicated by a inbox-backlog-nudge:<local-date> key, so a restart or a second check the same day can't double-fire.
• The nudge counts sessions, and the card it raises is an inbox alert (a different table), so the card can never inflate the backlog it's reporting.

Where it lives: src/main/services/inbox-backlog-nudge/ (the checker + the three signal queries + the pure evaluator), src/shared/alert-features/inbox-backlog-nudge-alert.ts (shared dedup key + gate), and the card's "Turn off these nudges" mute in src/renderer/src/features/alerts/AlertInboxViewer.tsx. It reuses the shared inbox-alert primitive (inbox-alerts.md) for dedup, snooze, and dismissal.

Related

The card it raises is an inbox alert, which owns the dismissal, snooze and dedup behaviour it reuses. The inbox it is nudging you to clear is described in the Inbox overview.