The task system
Capturing something takes about five seconds, from wherever I am. I speak into my phone or type a line and it lands straight in the inbox. Voice capture is transcribed by a local Whisper model on my own Mac rather than being sent off to a transcription API, so nothing I say into it reaches a third party before I see it written down. From my laptop I can write a task in a sentence and it gets classified and filed the same way. Both phone routes also drop a calendar hold and a silent reminder as backup, so a capture never depends on one system alone.
Every morning a triage pass looks at everything so I don't have to. It reads new items in context, merges anything that is really a duplicate of something already tracked, scores whatever arrived unscored, flags projects that have gone quiet without a deadline, and archives what has been closed out. What is left is a clean queue rather than a pile to sort.
Every open task carries a priority score (urgency multiplied by importance), so the working queue ranks itself instead of me re-deciding the order every day. A real deadline pulls a task up the list as it approaches, and nothing gets a deadline that wasn't actually said or written somewhere first.
Two surfaces show the state of play. The Dashboard opens on the week ahead, with every task that has a day assignment grouped by day, today first, and then one tabbed block holding the active queue, the parked list, what arrived in the last fortnight, and everything. A second, narrower page holds just today - today's and overdue tasks, closeable in place, next to today's mail and reading. Day assignments get written three ways. A parser resolves an unambiguous date hint at capture time, the resident agent resolves ambiguous ones in context within the half hour, and the rest get assigned at a planning sitting, and nothing ever overwrites a date already set.
The system can close tasks itself, but it has to show its work. Every closure carries a record of which route closed it (the Butler did the work, a condition I wrote came true, or evidence turned up that the world had moved past it), when, and what the evidence was. It is a claim for me to check rather than a verdict. Tasks closed by Claude sit in their own view rather than disappearing, agreeing is one status flip, and overturning reopens the task and logs the disagreement, so the system learns where its judgement was wrong. If Claude did the work itself and I reopen it, I am asked whether the work should be undone too. And the system errs towards leaving things open, because a wrongly closed task costs me a moment noticing whereas a wrongly open one costs nothing.
Which is to say I delegate to it, but I get a paper trail back rather than having to take it on faith.