todo: split the watcher — a script transcribes, an agent reads

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

TODO.md

@@ -57,14 +57,22 @@ the owner's OS user and can never be granted. Indirection there really is accide
       prompt from the prompt library, or a chat message; and how a file is marked consumed so it is not
       picked up twice.
 
-      **This may not need building at all — check that first (owner, 2026-08-21).** A recurring agent
-      job already does it: the same hourly loop that logs a heartbeat can instead be told "look in this
-      folder for new markdown files and file what they contain as todos". No registry, no new trigger,
-      no `pushTurn` door — the agent is already the thing that acts, and the prompt is the
-      configuration. So the honest question before writing any code is **what a built-in watcher would
-      buy over a standing agent job**: probably arrival-time firing instead of a poll, a UI to see and
-      manage watchers, and surviving without a session open. If those are not worth it, the feature is
-      a prompt, not a subsystem.
+      **The split, settled by the owner 2026-08-21: it is two stages, and only one of them is an
+      agent.**
+
+      1. **Audio lands → transcribe.** Purely mechanical: watch the directory, call the transcription
+         service, write the markdown out. A script and a service call, no model anywhere. This is the
+         part that genuinely needs building, and building it as a script is the point — an agent here
+         would be cost and nondeterminism for a job with one correct answer.
+      2. **Markdown appears → read, understand, act.** Reading a note and deciding it is a todo (and
+         which one, and where it belongs) is real agent work. This half needs no new infrastructure:
+         a recurring agent job already does it — the same hourly loop that logs a heartbeat can instead
+         be told "look in this folder for new markdown and file what it contains". The prompt is the
+         configuration.
+
+      So the watcher to build is the dumb one. What a built-in watcher buys over a standing agent job
+      for stage 2 — arrival-time firing instead of a poll, a UI to manage watchers, working with no
+      session open — is worth re-asking then, not now.
 
 ## Prompt library