pastilhasandClaude Fable 5
6071ded175
TODO.md had reached 1050 lines and 72 open items across 28 sections, read mostly on a phone. It is now a directory: todo/<theme>/<item>.md, one card per file, with frontmatter carrying id, status, created date and order, and the prose body copied across verbatim. TODO.md becomes a generated index (bun run todo:index). Dates: where an item's prose stated one it is used; otherwise its old section's; otherwise 2026-08-20, floored at the day before the split rather than invented. date_source records which. Shaped for a two-way Kanban board, filed as todo/tooling — a card is a file, id is the identity, frontmatter is the machine's half and the body is the owner's. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
46 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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id: file-watchers/watch-a-directory-and-attach-actions-to-what
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title: "Watch a directory, and attach actions to what lands in it"
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theme: file-watchers
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status: open
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created: 2026-08-21
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date_source: stated
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order: 1
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---
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**Watch a directory, and attach actions to what lands in it.** Wanted 2026-08-21. The owner sets a
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watcher on a path and configures what happens when a file appears there — the general mechanism,
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not one hard-coded flow.
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**The driving use case, end to end:** instead of opening a chat, record an audio note; it lands in
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a watched directory; the existing transcription path turns it into a text file; and on the watch,
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an agent picks the new files up and files them as todos. So the owner can capture an idea with no
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session open and no phone unlocked into the right screen.
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What it needs, in rough order: a watcher registry (path + what to do), a trigger that fires on
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file arrival rather than on a clock, and a way to hand the file to an agent turn. **The third is
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no longer missing** — see "Speaking into a session from the backend"; the nudger already starts a
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server-side turn with no browser attached. What is missing here is arrival-triggered firing, since
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the existing scheduler is a clock tick.
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Open, not decided: whether the watcher is a plugin or core; whether "action" is a task, a
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prompt from the prompt library, or a chat message; and how a file is marked consumed so it is not
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picked up twice.
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**The split, settled by the owner 2026-08-21: it is two stages, and only one of them is an
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agent.**
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1. **Audio lands → transcribe.** Purely mechanical: watch the directory, call the transcription
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service, write the markdown out. A script and a service call, no model anywhere. This is the
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part that genuinely needs building, and building it as a script is the point — an agent here
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would be cost and nondeterminism for a job with one correct answer.
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2. **Markdown appears → read, understand, act.** Reading a note and deciding it is a todo (and
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which one, and where it belongs) is real agent work. This half needs no new infrastructure:
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a recurring agent job already does it — the same hourly loop that logs a heartbeat can instead
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be told "look in this folder for new markdown and file what it contains". The prompt is the
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configuration.
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So the watcher to build is the dumb one. What a built-in watcher buys over a standing agent job
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for stage 2 — arrival-time firing instead of a poll, a UI to manage watchers, working with no
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session open — is worth re-asking then, not now.
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