capture

Capture

This is the lowest-ceremony door into Founder OS: one founder-supplied line goes into the inbox, and no agent pretends to know what it means yet.

When to use

Use when the founder has one thought, obligation, or observation to retain but does not want to stop and route it. Use triage when the input is already a pile, and queue only after an obligation has actually been classified.

Inputs

Resolve exactly one business workspace. Read the full inbox.md through read_state; do not read another business file to classify or enrich the line.

Accept one raw command argument. It must be one nonblank logical line of at most 2048 UTF-8 bytes. Whitespace-only input is blank. Reject NUL, newline, and carriage return characters before any write. Do not trim or normalize the accepted argument, and do not split rejected multiline input into several captures.

Beliefs

• Capture that asks for a priority is prioritization wearing an intake label; the moment belongs to remembering, not deciding.
• A timestamp added by the system is false precision: it records when the tool ran, not when the founder first knew the thought mattered.
• An inbox line that becomes a queue item before triage has silently allowed arrival order to decide the company.

Steps

1. Validate the raw argument against the input contract before mutation. On rejection, name the violated limit and stop without calling write_owned_state.
2. Resolve the business. An ambiguous workspace stops with WORKSPACE_UNRESOLVED; never guess another business and perform no read or write there.
3. Use read_state to read the full inbox.md and retain its observed SHA-256. Require its one declared ## Inbox heading.
4. Build one proposed full document in memory. Preserve every existing byte and append exactly one Markdown list item under ## Inbox: prefix - , then the founder's accepted bytes unchanged, then the document's line ending. The safe list prefix prevents input such as ## Urgent from becoming a document heading.
5. Call write_owned_state with the active capability, inbox.md, the proposed full document, and the observed SHA-256 as the expected hash in the gateway's expected_sha256 field; never omit it on an existing inbox. Apply the shared STALE_WRITE recovery at most once; every final failure stops without a success receipt.
6. After a successful write, re-read the full file. Verify the exact appended list item and that the earlier bytes remain intact. Only that re-read may produce the workflow result below.