The Inbox & proposals
One queue of everything waiting on you — proposed documents, merge suggestions, and flagged contradictions.
Once a project runs standing automations, things start needing you at times you didn't choose. The Inbox is the single queue for all of it: one place, project-wide, holding everything that is waiting on a human.
What lands there
| Item | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Proposed documents | An automation drafted an entry and wants your yes before it goes live. |
| Merge proposals | The Organizer found two near-duplicate entries and suggests folding them. |
| Contradiction flags | Two documents in the same area disagree, and only you can say which is right. |
| Failed runs | A loop errored and stopped rather than guessing. |
| Stuck PRs | A pull request that can't move on its own. |
The point of collecting these in one queue is that you don't have to go looking. You don't audit five dashboards to find out whether the swarm is blocked on you — you open one list, and it's either empty or it isn't.
Active on write, or proposed
Not everything needs approval, and pretending otherwise would make the Inbox useless noise. Each collection an automation writes to is wired one of two ways:
- Active on write — the run's output applies immediately. Right for work that is mechanical and reversible: a changelog entry, a triage label. If it's wrong, you fix it, and the version history shows what happened.
- Proposed — the run files a draft and stops. The document exists, attributed and versioned, but it isn't in force until you approve it.
Which mode applies is part of the automation's wiring, not a per-run decision by the agent — see building your own. So the level of autonomy you grant a loop is a setting you chose once, in the open, rather than something an agent talks itself into.
Approving and dismissing
Two outcomes, both recorded:
- Approve applies the document. A proposed knowledge entry becomes live memory that every agent's manifest can see; an accepted merge folds the duplicates.
- Dismiss retires it. The draft stops waiting, and it doesn't come back on the next pass.
Either way, your decision is written into the document's version history — who decided, when, and on what. A dismissal isn't a deletion of evidence; it's a documented "no". Months later, "why isn't this in our knowledge base?" has an answer.
Why the queue exists at all
The Inbox is the visible edge of one rule that runs through the whole product: standing agents act unattended only where the work is mechanical and reversible. Anything that needs judgment routes to a human decision.
An agent can safely notice that two entries say the same thing. It should not be the one deciding which of two contradictory claims about your security model is true, or that a subsystem's canonical pattern has changed. Those calls belong to someone who is accountable for them.
So the loops keep running while you sleep, and the decisions they can't legitimately make queue up instead of being made badly. The Organizer can rebuild your Atlas nightly precisely because the only thing it does unsupervised is organize — everything with a real consequence lands here, waiting, until you say yes.