capture

name	capture
description	Capture a todo, reminder, or issue from natural language and route it — TickTick (Personal/Work/Shopping) or GitHub Issue on the right repo. Single entry point for "remind me to…", "I should…", "todo:", "issue:" intents
version	1.0.0
metadata	{"hermes":{"tags":["capture","todo","reminder","issue","ticktick","github","routing"],"related_skills":["argo-api","karakeep","obsidian"]}}

Capture (TickTick + GitHub Issues)

Single entry point for capturing things Johannes wants to track. You decide where it lands. No double-tracking — one item, one home.

---

Mental Model (the routing rule)

GitHub = a concrete code change a Claude coding agent can execute end-to-end — implement, fix, refactor, write tests, bump deps, wire config. TickTick = anything a human does — including research, evaluation, exploration, decisions, manual ops, errands, appointments.

Key distinction (this is where most mistakes happen): "dev-flavoured" wording does NOT mean GitHub. Researching a tool, checking out a library, evaluating options, deciding between two approaches — these are human cognitive tasks. They go to TickTick even when the topic is engineering. Only translate to a GitHub issue when the work is "go change the code in X way."

Phrase	Where	Why
"Implement X" / "Fix Y" / "Refactor Z"	GitHub	Concrete change
"Add tests for X" / "Bump dep Y"	GitHub	Concrete change
"Look into X" / "Checkout Y" / "Research Z"	TickTick	Human exploration
"Compare A vs B" / "Decide on X"	TickTick	Human decision
"Evaluate Z for our use case"	TickTick	Human judgment

Hard override: anything IU / International University / work / colleague names → TickTick 💼Work. Never GitHub, even if it's an engineering task.

Not a task at all? Redirect — don't force it into TickTick/GitHub:

• A link/article/video to read or keep later, or a snippet to re-find → the karakeep skill (read-later bucket).
• A durable idea / knowledge note to develop → the obsidian skill (the vault).
• A request to research something now and report back (not a task to remember) → the research-gateway skill (cited answer from the research-gateway). Note the split: "research X" / "recherchier mal" = answer now → research-gateway; "remind me to research X / look into Y later" = a task to track → TickTick (the Research Z row above).

Capture owns actionable items (do-this) and concrete code changes. "Keep / read later" is reference; "note this idea" is knowledge — both have their own skills.

---

Decision Tree

Walk top to bottom. First match wins.

1. IU / Work signal? ("IU", "International University", "work", colleague name, EP-XX ticket, IU project) → TickTick 💼Work.
2. Names a known repo or matches a repo's domain? → GitHub Issue in that repo.
3. Shopping signal? ("buy X", "pick up Y", grocery items, items to acquire) → TickTick 📦Shopping.
4. Personal life? (appointment, errand, "water plants", "cancel subscription", "release the X video", health, finance, household) → TickTick 🏠Personal.
5. Unclear → ask one short question ("→ GitHub homelab or TickTick 🏠Personal?"). If still unclear after one round, fall back to TickTick Inbox.

Confidence: if ≥90% sure, write silently and confirm with link. If less, ask first.

---

Repo Detection (GitHub path)

A capture maps to a repo when it:

• Names the repo explicitly ("homelab", "dotfiles", "basalt-ui").
• Names a service/domain owned by that repo — e.g. "the watchdog cron" → homelab (or watchdog repo, check both); "the slack patch" → dotfiles; "the morning briefing prompt" → dotfiles; "rollhook deploy logs" → rollhook.
• Names a file/path that lives in a known repo.

If the repo identity is genuinely ambiguous between two candidates, ask.

Common repo → domain hints

Repo	Owns
homelab	Docker stack, 25+ containers, infra services on home network
homelab-private	Private homelab services (homelab API, secrets)
vps	VPS Docker stack, Traefik, RollHook, Postgres, Valkey
dotfiles	Claude Code config, Hermes skills/cron/SOUL/scripts, statusline, hooks, dotfiles
basalt-ui	NPM-published Tailwind v4 design system
basalt-ui-playground	TanStack Start boilerplate using basalt-ui
watchdog	Self-healing infrastructure agent + React SPA
rollhook / rollhook-action	Zero-downtime Docker rolling deploys + GitHub Action
sideclaw	MCP tooling used by skills
jkrumm.dev	Personal site
home	Home dashboard
Auto-Claude	Autonomous multi-session AI coding
homebrew-tap	Homebrew formulas for jkrumm tools

This list is a hint, not exhaustive. The live cache (see below) is the source of truth.

---

State Cache

File: ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json (gitignored, seeded from state.example.json on first make setup)

{
  "repos": [
    {"name": "homelab", "description": "...", "visibility": "PUBLIC"},
    ...
  ],
  "repos_last_refresh": "2026-04-30T12:00:00Z",
  "ticktick_projects": [
    {"id": "69a32ea26de7515d72e6c664", "name": "🏠Personal"},
    {"id": "69a32ea26df1515d72e6c668", "name": "💼Work"},
    {"id": "69a32ea26dc8115d72e6c66c", "name": "📦Shopping"}
  ],
  "ticktick_last_refresh": "2026-04-30T12:00:00Z"
}

Refresh policy: never expire. Refresh on miss only — if the user mentions a repo or TickTick project not in the cache, refresh that cache once and try again.

Read cache

cat ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json | jq '.repos[].name'
cat ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json | jq '.ticktick_projects'

Refresh repos cache (run on miss)

TMP=$(mktemp)
gh repo list jkrumm --limit 200 --json name,description,visibility,isArchived \
  | jq '[.[] | select(.isArchived==false) | {name, description, visibility}]' > "$TMP"
jq --slurpfile repos "$TMP" \
  '.repos = $repos[0] | .repos_last_refresh = (now | strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"))' \
  ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json > "$TMP.merged"
mv "$TMP.merged" ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json
rm -f "$TMP"

Refresh TickTick projects cache (run on miss)

TMP=$(mktemp)
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $HOMELAB_API_KEY" \
  "https://argo.jkrumm.com/api/ticktick/projects" \
  | jq '[.data[] | select(.closed != true) | {id, name}]' > "$TMP"
jq --slurpfile projects "$TMP" \
  '.ticktick_projects = $projects[0] | .ticktick_last_refresh = (now | strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"))' \
  ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json > "$TMP.merged"
mv "$TMP.merged" ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json
rm -f "$TMP"

---

Writing the Item

TickTick (Personal / Work / Shopping / Inbox)

POST to the argo TickTick endpoint (argo-api → references/tasks.md has the field semantics). Resolve project name → ID via the cache.

# Resolve project ID (cache hit expected)
PROJECT_ID=$(jq -r '.ticktick_projects[] | select(.name == "💼Work") | .id' ~/.hermes/skills/capture/state.json)

# Create task — title is short imperative, dueDate optional
curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $HOMELAB_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"title\":\"Renew Tailscale cert\",\"projectId\":\"$PROJECT_ID\",\"dueDate\":\"2026-05-30\",\"priority\":3}" \
  "https://argo.jkrumm.com/api/ticktick/tasks"

Inbox fallback: projectId: "inbox" (literal string, no cache lookup needed).

Date inference (default to giving every TickTick task a dueDate):

• "tomorrow", "next Monday", "in 2 weeks" → resolve relative to today's date and pass dueDate as YYYY-MM-DD.
• "this week" / "soon" / vague urgency → today + 7 days.
• "this month" → end of current month.
• No urgency cue at all → default dueDate = today + 7 days. Tasks without dates fall out of /summary and become invisible in briefings, so the default lean is give it a date.
• Only omit dueDate when the task is genuinely time-flexible AND high-priority enough that it should surface anyway (priority: 5 will cause briefings to flag it). When in doubt, set a date.

Priority inference:

• "urgent" / "ASAP" → 5 (High).
• Default → omit (None).

GitHub Issue

gh issue create -R jkrumm/<repo> \
  --assignee jkrumm \
  --title "<short imperative title>" \
  --body "$(cat <<'EOF'
<one-line context Hermes inferred>

Original capture: <verbatim user text>
EOF
)"

Rules:

• Assignee: always jkrumm. No labels at v1.
• Title: short, imperative. Strip filler ("can you...", "I think we should...").
• Body: one inferred context line + Original capture: <verbatim>. Never invent reproduction steps, acceptance criteria, or facts not present in the user's message.
• The gh CLI returns the issue URL on stdout — capture and surface it in the confirmation.

---

Confirmation Format (Slack)

After writing, reply with one line containing:

• The destination (icon + project/repo)
• The title
• A clickable link

:white_check_mark: TickTick 💼Work — "Renew Tailscale cert" → https://ticktick.com/...
:white_check_mark: GitHub `homelab` — "Patch slack cannot_reply_to_message edge case" → https://github.com/jkrumm/homelab/issues/123

If you asked first and the user confirmed, no need to repeat the title — just the link.

---

Edge Cases & Failure Modes

• Repo cache miss: user mentions a repo not in cache → refresh repos once → if still missing, ask ("I don't see <name> in your repos — did you mean <closest match>?").
• TickTick project miss: new project added in TickTick → refresh once, retry.
• gh not authenticated: if gh issue create fails with auth error, surface the error verbatim and tell Johannes to run gh auth status on the Mac Mini.
• Cross-cutting items: never create both. If the item is repo work and something Johannes needs to remember, GitHub wins (the watchdog/briefing reads issues anyway).
• Multiple items in one message ("remind me to X and also open an issue for Y"): split, route each independently, return one confirmation line per item.
• Social media link capture (Instagram, TikTok, etc.): the user is asking for the thing behind the link, not the link itself. Extract full content before writing the item. For Instagram: the caption is visible even behind the login wall — extract the entity name from the snapshot, then web-search for the canonical source (e.g. filmsimrecipes.com for Fujifilm recipes). See references/social-media-extraction.md for the full escalation path.
• Not a capture: if the message is a question or status check, don't capture — route normally.

---

Examples

"Remind me to renew the Tailscale cert next month" → TickTick 🏠Personal, dueDate = today + 30d.

"I need to fix the slack patch breaking on long threads" → GitHub dotfiles (concrete code change).

"Buy oat milk" → TickTick 📦Shopping, dueDate = today + 7d (vague urgency).

"EP-1234 — finish the enrolment form validation" → TickTick 💼Work (IU ticket → never GitHub).

"The watchdog cron prompt could be tighter" → GitHub dotfiles (concrete code change to hermes/cron/watchdog.prompt.txt).

"Cancel the Spotify family subscription" → TickTick 🏠Personal, dueDate = today + 7d.

"Refactor BasaltUI Button to use the new tokens" → GitHub basalt-ui (concrete refactor a coding agent can execute).

"Checkout imgproxy and Backblaze for image hosting" → TickTick 😇Dev (or 🏠Personal if Dev project not used) — research + evaluation is human work, not coding-agent work, even though the topic is technical. dueDate = today + 14d (typical research lead time).

"Look into the morning briefing prompt — it's getting long" → TickTick 🏠Personal — look into = exploration, not a code change. (If after reviewing the user wants to trim it, that follow-up becomes a GitHub dotfiles issue.)

"Compare Tailscale vs Cloudflare Tunnel for the homelab" → TickTick 🏛HomeLab (or 🏠Personal) — comparison + decision is human judgment.

"Evaluate moving from Postgres to SQLite for the small VPS apps" → TickTick 😇Dev — evaluation/decision, dueDate = today + 14d.

"Doctor's appointment Thursday at 3pm" → TickTick 🏠Personal, dueDate = next Thursday. (Calendar events are a separate concern — capture only stores the reminder.)

"Release v0.4 of basalt-ui" → TickTick 🏠Personal, dueDate = today + 3d. ("Release X" = pressing publish, human action.)

"Add OG tags to jkrumm.dev" → GitHub jkrumm.dev (concrete code addition).

Ambiguous: "Look at the morning briefing" → Default to TickTick 🏠Personal (exploration), dueDate = today + 7d. If the user later says "actually make the prompt shorter," that follow-up is a GitHub dotfiles issue.