Triage

A box is a directory of your data, kept under version control with a full history of changes (using git); a card is a markdown file with a structured header; the agent is the coding agent (Claude Code or Codex) that operates the box. Triage is the pipeline that decides where a newly arrived item belongs.

What it does for you

• Takes anything landing in the box unsorted (a voice memo, a scanned document, an email, a clipped page) and files it toward the process that should handle it.
• Learns your categories from where you file things, rather than requiring you to define a taxonomy up front.
• Asks a question instead of guessing when an item does not clearly fit an existing category, and treats your answer as a rule to apply next time, not just a one-off placement.
• Lets you promote a new category simply by dropping a landmark card at a directory, marking it as a triage destination.

What it needs

Nothing beyond the box itself; triage runs over whatever connectors and capture paths you already use.

How it works, briefly

The process has three stages: intake (clean up the item, for example transcribing speech or pulling text out of a scanned image, without deciding where it goes), triage (pick a category and move the item to that category's holding spot), and handle (run the category's procedure to reach the item's final resting place). Each stage is a real step recorded in the box, so a partially triaged item is visible, not stuck invisibly partway through. Triage runs automatically during regular check-ins and other automated passes, not only when you ask. The coding agent does the sorting by default. A box can instead opt in to a small judging model (reached through OpenRouter) that is given the prepared text of the item and your filing rules, may do a bounded amount of research on unclear items, and leaves a record in the box of what it decided and why. Earlier decisions can be replayed against a proposed rule change before the change is kept. A filing destination can also carry a follow-up question ("does this need follow-up?"); a yes adds an ordinary todo for the agent, and authorizes nothing more.

Limits

The category rule set does not automatically rewrite itself from a low- confidence answer today; you edit the category's card by hand when a pattern emerges. An item the categorizer truly cannot place lands in an unhandled holding area rather than being forced into the nearest category. With the judging model, the item's text and your filing rules leave the machine, the documentation says it asks the provider not to retain them without being able to promise that, and the record it keeps in the box holds that prepared text until you delete it. The documentation also says a large scan can still be only partly read, and that the structured text is favored over details such as stamps or signatures that extraction did not keep.

Go deeper

../reference/triage.md, ../reference/cards/landmark.md, questions.md