wt-capture

name	wt-capture
description	Records something the user has said they must do themselves: classifies the commitment as next, waiting, someday or trivial, writes it as an action page in their commitments base, and hands off to wt-schedule when it needs real hours. Use when the user commits to work of their own — "I need to find time to…", "I have to…", "remind me to…", "help me remember…", "put that on my list", "I should … at some point". Do NOT use when the user asks the assistant to do the work ("write the CFP", "research X", "email Sam") — that is a request to act now, not a commitment to track. Do NOT use for thoughts, facts or notes carrying no commitment; those are knowledge and belong to kb-capture.
metadata	{"aos":{"origin":"work-tracker@0.1.0"}}

capture

Write the page, confirm, hand off. Under five seconds to the confirmation.

Clarify — one question, asked of yourself

Is this mine to do? Not "is it actionable?" — everything is actionable to an agent, so that question routes every request into the list.

The commitment is	status:	plus	then
real work of the user's	next	—	hand off to wt-schedule
someone else's to answer	waiting	waiting_on:	nothing more
a deadline, not hours	next	due:	a reminder, no block
not now, maybe never	someday	—	nothing more
trivial	next	estimate:	say "that's a two-minute job — worth doing now?" and file it anyway

status is one of exactly those four words. Nothing validates it, so a fifth value — trivial, blocked, urgent — is written happily and then matches none of the steward's queries nor its --without block backstop, which makes the commitment permanently invisible. Trivial work is next with a small estimate:, not a status of its own.

someday protects the list: without it every musing becomes a scheduled commitment, and a schedule the user stops trusting is worse than none.

Never block on the recommendation. Ask about the two-minute job in the same breath as confirming, not instead of it — a commitment lost to a clarifying question costs more than a wrong estimate. If the exchange resolves it ("yeah, done"), file it done with an expires: rather than skipping the page.

Write it

The page is actions/<slug>.md, and there is no kb verb that creates one — write it with ordinary file tools, then attribute it:

kb --base commitments commit --verb create --path actions/write-the-cfp.md \
  --summary "commitment: write the KubeCon CFP"

All three flags are required. Skip this and the page reaches git only through the sync sweep, with no acting subject, and kb lint reports it — as a report, not a failure: bare kb lint exits 0 even with criticals in it, so read what it says rather than trusting the exit code.

Frontmatter. The four marked required are the ones kb lint reports as missing — write all seven anyway, since the steward's queries depend on status and since:

title: call the dentist        # required
type: action                   # required
created: <DATE>            # required
timestamp: <TIMESTAMP>    # required
status: next                   # plus due / estimate / waiting_on per the table above
since: <DATE>
slipped: 0

The user's own words go in the body, verbatim — that sentence is the only record of what they actually committed to, and a tidier paraphrase is usually a paraphrase of what you assumed they meant.

Then add the page to index.md, or it is invisible to the map even though every query still finds it: kb --base commitments index rebuild does it mechanically.

Shape and the full field list: the work-tracker skill's reference/action-page.md.

A correction to something already filed is kb capture --corrects <path> — a link, not prose for a later pass to guess at.

Hand off

Needs real hours → invoke wt-schedule, in a sub-agent where the harness has them and inline otherwise. Say which you did, because "blocked 14:00–16:00 tomorrow" and "filed, no calendar here" are different promises and the user is entitled to know which one they got.

The user should experience one act, not two. wt-schedule comes back with the time; you confirm once, with the time in it.

How the confirmation reads is the user's call: verb-first phrasing, confirmed with a single 🦜 emoji and nothing else — never echo the commitment back. Some people want the commitment phrased back in full, some want one emoji and nothing else. Honour it exactly — this is the line they see several times a day, and it is the whole surface of an interaction whose other half is silent.

When something fails

The commitment matters more than the bookkeeping around it. If the page landed and the attribution, the flag or the hand-off did not, mention it and move on — an unscheduled action is one without a block, which the steward's --without block backstop already finds. Losing the thought is the only real failure here.