Cadence

The Inbox

Workspace-level triage queue for bugs, feedback, ideas, features, and questions

The Inbox is a single landing zone for everything that comes in over the day or week — before it's worth turning into committed project work. One place, every workspace member sees it, triaged on a regular cadence.

When to use the Inbox

Use the Inbox whenever the thing isn't a clear, actionable task yet. If you already know which project owns it and what needs to happen, skip the Inbox and create an issue directly.

Drop into Inbox Create an issue directly
"Customer said checkout feels slow" "Add caching to /api/cart (CACHE-12)"
"Random thought: what if we added templates?" "Implement template picker on /new"
"User asked how to export data" "Document the export endpoint"

The five kinds

Every inbox item carries a kind — the rough shape of the thing. Pick one when you capture, change it during triage if you guessed wrong.

Kind Use for
bug Something broken that needs investigation. May or may not turn into a fix.
feedback A user said something. Could be praise, frustration, a use-case nuance.
idea A half-formed thought you want to remember. Default kind.
feature A concrete capability request, big or small.
question A thing you don't know yet and want to find out.

These map roughly to Linear's labels, but kept as a single mutually-exclusive enum to keep the inbox view scannable. Filter by kind to triage one bucket at a time.

Lifecycle

new ──"Mark reviewed"──▶ reviewed ──"Promote"──▶ converted (becomes an issue)
 │                          │
 └──"Archive"──┐             └──"Archive"──┐
               ▼                            ▼
            archived                     archived
  • new — fresh capture, nobody's looked at it yet
  • reviewed — triaged: kind is correct, content makes sense, decision pending
  • archived — won't act on it (kept for history, dimmed in the list)
  • converted — already promoted into a project issue; the link is preserved via inbox_item_issues

Promoting to an issue

When an inbox item is ready to act on, click Promote to issue. You pick which project should own it; the new issue inherits the title (editable) and the description content. The original inbox item is marked converted and stays in the archive view for traceability.

Sources

Inbox items track where they came from via the source field:

Source Created by
manual A human typing into the Capture form
ai The ⌘K command bar or an MCP-driven agent
email (future) inbound email-to-inbox
api An external integration via the MCP server or /api/inbox/create

This makes it easy to filter "what landed via the integration last week" vs. "what the team added themselves".

Triage cadence

The Inbox earns its keep when reviewed regularly — otherwise it becomes a graveyard. A workable rhythm:

1

Whenever — Capture

Drop the thing in. Don't overthink the kind; you can fix it later.

2

Daily — Skim new

Filter by new. Reclassify wrong kinds, archive obvious noise. Don't promote yet.

3

Weekly — Triage the queue

Walk the reviewed column. For each item: promote to issue (and pick a project), or archive. Aim to leave fewer than a handful of new items by Friday.

4

Quarterly — Audit archived

Patterns hide here. Lots of archived feedback items mentioning the same area? That's a goal candidate.

Using the Inbox via MCP

Every Inbox action is exposed through the built-in MCP server:

  • list_inbox_items — list items in a workspace (or across all of them)
  • create_inbox_item — capture a new item with a kind
  • set_inbox_item_kind — reclassify
  • archive_inbox_item — soft-archive
  • promote_inbox_item — turn it into an issue in a chosen project

This is how Claude (via the ⌘K command bar) can dump entire transcripts of customer calls into the inbox for the team to triage later.

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