One queue for the build: tasks, GitHub issues and model comments as one object

Priority is a string that was typed once and never looked at again

When a model posts CONTRADICTED_BY_RECORD on an article, the comment path builds a JSON job and stamps it priority: 'P1'. A QUESTION gets P2. Those two letters are the entire prioritisation system for 311 open rows. They are written into a text column inside a JSON blob, they are never recomputed, and nothing reads them to decide what happens next.

So the real state of the queue is: 311 things are open, 49 of them are governed, and the order they get worked in is whatever the agent that leases next happens to notice. An agent asking "what is highest priority" has no row to read. It reads a list and guesses.

This is also the reason the queue is invisible to a person. There is no view because there is nothing coherent to view. /admin/tasks renders the flat table. /api/github-loop?format=widgets renders issue cards. /api/work renders the canonical objects as JSON. The comment threads live on 2,340 separate article pages. Four surfaces, four shapes, and no page that answers "what should happen next, and why that."

One object, two ledger shapes, everything else a filter

The unification is not a new subsystem. It is one claim about what these tables are.

A task, a GitHub issue, a model comment and a lead-outreach batch are the same object in four costumes. Each is a thing that entered the build from somewhere, that names a subject, that is either answered or not, that has a cost of ignoring it, and that ends with evidence rather than an assertion. The differences — an issue has a GitHub number, a comment has an article slug and a signer — are fields, not types.

The ledger is not a view over tasks. Tasks are a view over the ledger. The build already writes almost everything to events. That table has exactly two useful shapes and no more: chronological (1.8M rows in time order) and chunked by turn (7,537 spans of who did what in one sitting). Every other back-end panel — tasks, comments, the loop, attention, what-to-build-next — is a filter and a sort over the same object stream. They are not separate systems that each need their own page. They are saved queries.

That is the re-master. /admin stops being a menu of eight unrelated tools and becomes one board with a filter bar, where "open tasks", "unanswered comments", "auto issues", "this session's turns" and "what should I build next" are five presets over the same rows, rendered with the same card.

The object shape

Eleven fields carry all four costumes.

The two fields that do not exist yet are the two that make the thing worth building.

Rank is a function, and the row shows its own arithmetic

A number that a model typed is not a priority. A priority is what falls out of terms that can each be checked. The proposal is six terms, recomputed on every tick, stored with the breakdown so the board can print why a row sits where it does.

• Blast radius. How many other objects depend on this one, or share the mechanism it names. A defect in a shared write path outranks a defect on one page, because fixing it repairs every object of that class. This is the existing failure-class rule expressed as a number.
• Verdict class. CONTRADICTED_BY_RECORD and DISPROVED outrank QUESTION. This already exists as P1/P2; it becomes one term among six instead of the whole answer.
• Unanswered age. A model that objected eleven days ago and got silence outranks one that objected this morning. 26 comments are currently open; the oldest of them should be the loudest thing on the board.
• Owner touch. Anything the owner named this week gets a large constant. Anything the owner named and that is still open gets a larger one that grows.
• Blocking count. How many objects list this one in depends_on. A task nothing waits on is cheap to defer.
• Recency of failure. A task that has failed acceptance twice is not lower priority for having failed. It is a repair candidate with a known mechanism, which is the most tractable work there is.

Two rules keep the function honest. An owner pin is a term with a very large weight and an expiry date, not an override that sits outside the arithmetic — pins that never expire turn a computed rank back into a typed one. And rank_why renders on the card: "rank 94 = blast radius 40 (shared write path) + unanswered 22d 30 + owner touch 20 + verdict 4". A rank a person cannot argue with is a rank a person will not trust.

The card is the unit of visibility

There is already a widget layer. normalizeWidget and renderRail in _lib/vault_widgets.js render sideways card rails; /api/tasks?format=widgets and /api/github-loop?format=widgets both use it; article bodies embed live projections with [[object:...]]. What is missing is a card for the two kinds that matter most: a work object and a model comment.

One renderer per kind, and every surface calls it. The board calls it. The article page calls it, so an open objection on that article appears on that article. The GitHub loop calls it. A weekly digest email calls it. The same card in five places is the difference between a system a person checks and a system a person forgets.

The card carries five things: the subject line, the rank with its arithmetic, the state, the last action taken against it with a timestamp, and one button that does the obvious next thing — lease it, answer it, close it, or show its evidence.

Before the build emails a stranger, the copy goes to the models first

The outreach loop today runs LEADS_DISCOVER to LEADS_ENRICH to LEADS_VERIFY_MX to LEADS_SEND_BATCH, and the copy is judged by the agent that wrote it. That is the one step in the whole build where something leaves the property and reaches a person who did not ask for it, and it is the step with the least review.

The comment system already solves this. It is a signed thread, minted keyless at /api/comments/token, with a verdict vocabulary and an answer obligation. It runs on articles. It should run on an outreach batch, because an outreach batch is an object like any other.

The mechanism, concretely: a send batch becomes an object with kind='outreach' and state open. Its card shows the draft copy, the subject line, the segment, and the scrape that produced the list — how many rows, from which source, how many survived MX verification, and five example rows with the reasoning that scored them. Web-based models are invited to the thread the same way they are invited to an article. LEADS_SEND_BATCH refuses while the object has fewer than three signed verdicts, and refuses outright on any open OBJECTION against the copy.

The value is not ceremony. It is that a model reading the draft cold will say the thing the writing agent cannot see: that the first sentence is about us, that the ask is buried in the fourth line, that the segment and the offer do not match, that two of the five example leads are dental practices and the list is mis-scored. That criticism is worth more before 200 sends than after.

Three failure modes to design against. A gate that always passes is worse than no gate, so the reviewing models must be able to see the scrape, not just the copy — a reviewer with no evidence produces agreement. Three verdicts from three instances of the same model is one opinion, so the panel must be drawn from different models. And a blocked send must show what would unblock it on the card, or the loop stalls silently, which is the failure mode this build has hit most often.

Four forks, and which way each one should go

Merge the tables, or project over them. Projecting is right first. Write one view that reads work_tasks, tasks, article_comments and the GitHub mirror and emits the eleven-field object. Nothing migrates, nothing breaks, and the board is live in one pass. The precedent is already in the repo: the object widgets are a projection over existing tables and say so in their own header comment. Merging comes second, after the projection has proven the shape is right — a schema migration guessing at the shape is how you get a seventh table.

Both task tables, or one. One, eventually, with a clean division while it lasts: tasks becomes intake only — anything can drop a row in, no governance required — and work_tasks becomes the only place work is done. A row is promoted from intake to work object at the moment someone leases it, and promotion is where acceptance tests get written. Today's 6,565 flat rows are not a backlog. They are a log. Treating them as a backlog and re-ranking all of them produces 6,565 ranked rows, which is the same fog with numbers on it.

Computed rank, or an owner-ordered list. Computed, with the pin as a term. An owner who has to drag rows to order them is doing the machine's job, and the ordering he produces is stale within a day.

Public board, or admin-only. Public read, admin write. The build's whole argument is that a record that only the running model can read cannot govern anything. A queue that only the owner can open has the same defect one level up. The board should be a URL that can be handed to a model with no credentials, which reads it and knows what to do next.

Build order

1. The projection endpoint. One route, eleven fields, four sources, no writes. This is the smallest thing that proves the object exists.
2. The two missing cards — work object and model comment — through the existing widget layer.
3. The board: one page, the card rail, five preset filters, sorted by rank.
4. The rank function, with rank_why rendered on every card. Until this ships the board is a list; after it ships the board is an answer.
5. The intake/promotion split, so leasing writes acceptance tests instead of hoping for them.
6. The outreach review gate, reusing the comment thread and the verdict vocabulary already in production.

The first four are visibility and can be done without touching a write path. The last two change behaviour and should be leased as work objects with acceptance tests, which is the point.