Idea inbox

Skill quietdaemon/starter-skills/skills/idea-inbox

Free, MIT-licensed starter skills for a private, self-hosted AI assistant — back itself up, capture ideas, search your notes, self-reflect. Built to adapt, not just copy. The free funnel for the quietdaemon guide + kit.

Install

npx -y skills add quietdaemon/starter-skills --skill idea-inbox

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One thing to look at

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What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Instantly capture an idea, task, or note into a backlog file and commit it — capture-first, zero friction. Use when the user says /idea ..., add idea: ..., capture this, log this, or tosses out a concept they don't want to lose.

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SKILL.md

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Idea Inbox

A friction-free capture chute. The user throws an idea at the assistant; it lands in a backlog file with a timestamp and is committed — in seconds, no questions asked. The whole value is speed and zero-loss: never make the user stop to categorize, confirm, or format. Capture first; organize later.

When to activate

The user:

Uses /idea ..., add idea: ..., capture this: ..., or log this: ...
Describes a concept they clearly want kept ("I was thinking we could…")

What you do

Extract the core idea from the message.
Format one line: YYYY-MM-DD — <concise idea> (optionally — <tag> if a category is obvious — best guess only, never ask).
Append + commit via the helper:
```
python3 <AGENT_HOME>/scripts/idea_inbox.py "<formatted line>"
```
(Give it ~30s; it does a git commit.)
On success (OK — captured): reply with just a short confirmation ("Captured."). Nothing more.
On failure: surface the error and offer to retry.

The capture-first rule (the point of this skill)

Do not ask for clarification — not the category, not the format, nothing. A 60-second capture that's slightly mis-tagged beats a perfect one the user abandoned mid-thought.
Do not add commentary, critique, or suggestions alongside the capture. This is an inbox, not a conversation.
Commit to a best guess on any optional field and move on.

Where it goes

A single Markdown backlog, e.g. <BACKLOG_FILE> (an ## Inbox section the user triages later). Keep one predictable home so nothing scatters.

Pitfalls

Don't let it become a chat. The failure mode is the assistant "helpfully" asking which project this belongs to — that defeats the entire purpose.
Idempotent-ish: if a commit fails (e.g. dirty tree mid-edit), report it rather than silently dropping the idea — the one thing this skill must never do is lose a capture.
Keep it scoped: capture ideas, not arbitrary long documents. Big writeups belong in their own file, not the inbox line.