Handoff Inbox Drain

handoff-inbox-drain

Drain a handoff review inbox with judgment, without owning a scheduler. Brigade stays invoke-only; this skill is the allowlist-bound agent recipe for triage.

When this applies

• A handoff draft inbox has pending or reviewed items to triage.
• An operator schedules a headless harness (claude -p, codex exec, or equivalent) against this skill.
• You are reinforcing existing memory, not inventing a parallel corpus.

Allowlist

Work only through this allowlist of Brigade surfaces and local reads:

• brigade handoff list
• brigade handoff show <id>
• brigade handoff archive <id>
• brigade handoff closeout (when the workspace supports it)
• brigade handoff lint / brigade handoff doctor for health checks
• Read/Grep of on-disk handoff files, memory/cards/, and related indexes already present in the target

Bash is scoped to those brigade handoff … commands only. Do not expand into arbitrary filesystem writes, remote APIs, unscoped shell, or tools outside this allowlist. Stay inside the handoff inbox / memory/cards/ roots; do not follow .. or symlinks out of those trees.

Grounded-edit rules

Every edit must be grounded. You must cite existing on-disk content (handoff body, card text, or index entry) before changing anything. Prefer reinforce-in-place: edit or refresh only what you can verify against a local source of truth. Date-bumps alone are not grounded edits.

Retention (never delete)

• Never delete handoff drafts or memory cards.
• Never remove inbox items by destructive filesystem ops.
• Never prune archives, queues, or card trees.
• Archive only: uncertain or done items go through archive/closeout paths, or a needs-human file the operator already uses.

Reinforce over duplicate (#724)

brigade ingest --promote-cards reinforces an existing card on exact content fingerprint match and inboxes near-match or opposite-polarity proposals for review. When draining the inbox:

1. Search existing cards and recent handoffs for the same fact or decision.
2. If ingest already proposed a near-match reinforce or contradiction, honor that routing — do not create a sibling card.
3. If a close match exists without an ingest proposal, reinforce that card (cite the on-disk source) instead of creating a sibling.
4. If unsure, leave the draft for human review rather than splitting the corpus.

Process

1. List pending drafts with the allowlist commands.
2. For each item, read the on-disk handoff and related cards.
3. Triage: archive noise, closeout completed review, reinforce an existing card when the fact matches, or park uncertain items for a human.
4. Capture outcomes against handoff-inbox-drain when verification is part of the run.
5. Stop when the inbox is drained or only needs-human items remain.

Failure paths

• Missing inbox or handoff source config: stop. Report the missing path/config; do not invent an inbox or create one.
• Empty inbox / no pending drafts: exit cleanly with "nothing to drain"; do not invent work.
• Malformed handoff entry (unreadable frontmatter, missing id, broken body): skip that item, leave it for a human, continue with the rest. Never rewrite a malformed file just to make the loop continue.

Out of scope

• session-sweep (blocked on #466)
• Scheduler or model-dispatch integration
• Automatic card creation without an on-disk citation