priority-triage

name	priority-triage
description	Triage incoming tasks, alerts, and events into P0/P1/P2 buckets. Use whenever Strategist receives a new task, an unhandled alert, or is deciding whether to issue a directive.
metadata	{"version":"1.0.0","type":"always-active"}

Priority Triage

Classify every incoming task, alert, or event into one of three buckets before issuing a directive or escalating. Clear bucket assignment prevents priority inflation.

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The Three Buckets

P0 — Do now. Everything else waits.

Trigger	Example
Production outage	Agents API returning 500s, Mission Control unreachable, event bus down
Security incident	Credential leak, unauthorized action detected, safety gate bypass
Human-escalated urgent	Elon pings #yclaw-alerts with "🚨 now" or direct mention with urgency
Legal/compliance trigger	Outbound content flagged for securities language, DMCA notice
Data loss imminent	Agent writing unreviewed content to a public channel, deploy rolling back inflight

Rule: Any action required to prevent or stop immediate damage. If you're not sure whether it's truly P0, treat it as P1 until evidence of real-world impact arrives.

P1 — Active sprint. Needs coordination within the day.

Trigger	Example
Blocked agent task	Architect reports a task blocked >4 hours, Builder DLQ retry exhausted
Stale review queue	Reviewer's reviewer:queue_stale event fires (>5 pending or >4h old)
Repeated agent failure	Same task failed 2+ times today (next fail = escalate to P0)
Cross-agent coordination gap	Ember needs an asset Forge hasn't produced; deadline within 24h
Stale PR	PR on YClawAI/YClaw CI-green + unreviewed for >1 hour

Rule: Max 5 P1 items active at once. If you're adding a 6th, something must be demoted to P2 or resolved first. Too many P1s means nothing is actually P1.

P2 — Backlog. Address during scheduled planning (weekly_directive / midweek_review).

Trigger	Example
Optimization idea	"We could cache X", "Ember could batch posts better"
Audit finding (non-critical)	Prompt contains a minor inconsistency, doc says "Slack" but should say "Discord"
Nice-to-have feature	Adding a new agent that isn't required by org mission
Cost trend concern	LLM spend up 15% month-over-month but still under budget
Recurring minor issue	Same agent posts slightly long messages occasionally

Rule: Never dispatch a directive for a P2 item mid-heartbeat. Collect them for the next scheduled planning cycle. Acting on P2 items out-of-cycle creates noise.

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Decision Tree

Ask these in order. Stop at the first YES.

1. Is production actively broken OR is immediate damage happening? → P0
2. Is it blocking active sprint work within today? → P1
3. Everything else → P2

If unsure between P0 and P1 → default P1. (You can always re-classify upward once evidence arrives.) If unsure between P1 and P2 → default P2. (Inflating P1 dilutes urgency.)

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Anti-Patterns

• "P0 because it's annoying." Annoying ≠ production-critical. Route to P2.
• "P1 because I'm the one looking at it now." Proximity ≠ priority.
• Upgrading P2 to P1 because it's old. Age doesn't create urgency. Close the ticket or demote.
• Splitting one P0 into three P1s. A P0 is a P0. Don't water it down by fracturing.
• Using priority to escalate to Elon. If it genuinely needs Elon, escalate via escalation-triage, not priority bumping.

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Examples from real agent orchestration

Scenario: Builder DLQ has 3 entries, all for the same repo, all failing CI.

• NOT P0 (no production impact — Builder isn't deploying, it's coding)
• P1 (systemic failure pattern needs Architect directive)
• Action: issue strategist:architect_directive with the 3 correlation IDs and ask for a single plan to unblock the pattern.

Scenario: sentinel:alert fires — Atlas connection dropping intermittently.

• P0 (infrastructure; production features depend on it)
• Action: escalate to Elon in #yclaw-alerts immediately with sentinel's payload; do NOT issue an autonomous directive (DB is external infra, out of agent scope).

Scenario: Ember's content score averaged 72/100 this week (down from 85).

• NOT P1 (no deadline, no block)
• P2 (collect for weekly_directive; pair with Forge output trend for context)
• Action: note in next standup_synthesis, not now.

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Out-of-scope for this skill

• How to escalate once classified as P0 — see escalation-triage skill.
• What directive to issue for a P1 item — see directive-authoring skill.
• Standup classification — see standup-synthesis skill.