The Inbox

The Inbox collects the Slack messages that matter to your work and keeps track of what has been done with each one. Its job is to help you sort real requests from chatter and act on the real ones.

Where messages come from

The background sync reads your Slack DMs, plus the channels you add under Settings › Inbox sources (type team or standup), every two minutes. It keeps the last 14 days. Posts Flightdeck or your agents sent for you are left out. Messages you typed yourself stay, marked as yours.

Marks: what's been done with a message

Every message has a state: unprocessed, work, architecture, chatter, unsure or archived.

In the app you mark a message work or chatter, and pressing it again clears the mark. Agents can mark messages too, from the command line:

flightdeck inbox read --channel <alias> --json
flightdeck inbox mark <alias> <ts> work --by <name>

--by names the agent or job that handled the message. The older mark noted is still accepted and read as work.

Your mark always wins

When you have marked a message, an agent's mark never replaces it: mark prints kept: the user's mark wins. An agent can't pretend to be you either, since --by user is refused.

Replying from the Inbox

It posts only when you confirm. You can reply to a DM, or in a DM's thread, from the Inbox, and each reply is shown for you to confirm before it is sent. Channels that are not DMs are read-only. Sorting and archiving never touch Slack.

The Inbox overhaul

In development

Everything below is being built, apart from the one rule marked as live. Today's Inbox works as described above.

The new Inbox sorts every message into a kind, then helps you act on it:

• Work: a real request.
• Architecture note: a decision or design point worth keeping.
• Chatter: nothing to act on.
• Unsure: a guess Flightdeck isn't confident about, shown with its two best guesses as buttons.

Who guesses. One rule is live today: a DM that only says thanks is filed as chatter. The other rules and the model are still being built. Fixed rules go first, with no AI model: a ticket key or a direct question to you points to Work, and bot posts or short acknowledgements point to Chatter. What the rules leave goes to a small Claude model that has no tools and treats the Slack text as data, never as instructions. It never posts, replies or archives anything in Slack. The rules and the model only make guesses, which show as dashed outlines with the reason on hover. One click confirms a guess, or you pick another kind. Your choice always wins.

Auto-sort and bulk accept. In the redesign, sorting can run by itself behind a switch you can turn off, or once when you press Sort now, with the model's daily token use capped and shown on a meter. Review & accept lists every guess at once: move the wrong ones, then accept the rest in one click. See What's coming.

Bulk archive. The Chatter list has one button to archive every guessed chatter message, after showing you the counts per channel, or you tick the ones you want.

Work actions. A Work message gets three buttons:

• Draft ticket opens a ticket form pre-filled from the message, with a link back to it. Nothing is filed until you confirm.
• Add to bucket puts the item in one of your work buckets.
• Send to monitor hands the message to a monitor's chat.

Once the action is done, the message is archived with a link to what it became.

A drafted reply. Once a Work action is done, you can send the sender a short reply in the message's thread, drafted for you, edited by you, and sent only when you confirm.

More sources later. Slack comes first, and Gmail is planned as a later source. Jira issues and Trello cards stay in Flightdeck's ticket and bucket views, not the Inbox.