Triage / Task Prioritization

Classify incoming work into P0-P3 by cost of delay, route it, and learn the user's real priority rules from their corrections. Learned rules and stated preferences persist in ~/Clawic/data/triage/ (created on first confirmed rule or stated preference; nothing is stored without the user's explicit yes). If you have data at an old location (~/triage/ or ~/clawic/triage/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/triage/.

When To Use

• Several tasks compete and you must pick an order
• A new request arrives mid-task and you must decide whether to interrupt — and how to switch safely
• A pile needs sorting: an inbox after time away, an ungroomed backlog, a ticket queue
• A bug, ticket, alert, or security report needs a priority, not just an acknowledgment
• The user uses priority language: "urgent", "ASAP", "drop everything", "no rush", "when you have time"
• The user reorders or overrides your queue — that is training data, not just an instruction
• Not for effort estimation or roadmap planning: triage decides when, not how long

Quick Reference

Depth on demand: signals.md reading urgency language, senders, sources · patterns.md learning protocol and memory format · interrupts.md switching safely, parking, stacked P0s · batch.md sweeps, piles, grooming, overflow · deadlines.md slack cases, real vs stated, negotiation · bugs.md bug, ticket, SLA, and alert triage.

Priority Levels

Each level has a boundary test. Run the tests top-down; first yes wins. Test states, not tone.

Core Rules

1. Priority = cost of delay, never effort or loudness. A hard task nobody waits on is P2; a 5-minute unblock for a stalled teammate is P1. Tie-break within a level: highest cost of delay per unit of effort first (WSJF, Reinertsen); when costs look equal, shortest job first.
2. Deadline urgency is slack, not calendar distance. Slack = working time until deadline − remaining work, counted in working_hours only. Friday deadline + 3 days of work, seen on Wednesday = negative slack = P1 today. A Monday-9am deadline seen Friday afternoon has near-zero slack. Recompute whenever scope grows; edge cases (timezones, dependency chains) in deadlines.md.
3. Misclassification is asymmetric — up is cheap, down is expensive. A false P0 costs one interruption; a missed P0 costs the whole damage window. Torn between adjacent levels with concrete urgency evidence → take the higher. No evidence, just tone → take the lower and label it: "Queued as P2 — say the word if it's blocking."
4. Ask only at the P0/P1 boundary. One closed question there beats a wrong guess. At P2/P3 the stakes don't cover the interruption cost — pick, state the assumption, move on.
5. Learn only through the ladder: observe → propose → confirm. One correction = record. Two same-direction corrections = propose ("Should deploy issues always be P0?"). Apply automatically only after an explicit yes, and cite the rule when applying it. Never silently internalize — full ladder and decay in patterns.md.
6. P0 is rare by construction. If over a week more than ~1/3 of items land P0/P1, the bar drifted — re-anchor on the level tests instead of inventing intermediate levels. When everything is urgent, nothing is.
7. Re-triage on state change, not on a timer. Triggers: deadline revealed or moved, blocker cleared, scope change, new P0. Each one re-sorts the whole queue; a queue sorted on stale facts is a wrong queue.

Queue Discipline

• P0 interrupts mid-task (interrupt_floor in config can extend this to P1). P1 waits for the current unit of work to finish — dropping a half-done change leaves broken state, which is its own incident. Exception: if current work is P2/P3, switch at the next safe point. Switching mechanics — parking note, resume protocol, stacked P0s: interrupts.md.
• Order within a level: confirmed user rules first, then ascending slack, then arrival order.
• Announce changes, not steady state: "New P0 — pausing X. Queue now: [incident, review, docs]." Silent reshuffles destroy the user's trust in the queue; verbosity is announce_style in config.
• A dated P2 gets scheduled the moment it enters the queue. A P2 that "ages into" a P0 was a triage failure, not an escalation — log it as a correction against yourself.
• When the queue exceeds capacity, triage becomes explicit rejection — propose drops by name, never silent starvation (batch.md, Overflow).

Output Gates

Before emitting a priority or a reordered queue:

• Is every P0 justified by accumulating damage or a level test — not by tone, caps, or sender seniority?
• Did I check ~/Clawic/data/triage/patterns.md for a confirmed rule before falling back to defaults?
• Am I auto-applying any rule the user never confirmed? If yes → propose instead.
• If queue order changed, did I say so and name what got bumped?
• If I am about to interrupt current work, does the paused task have a resume note (interrupts.md)?

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/triage/config.yaml.

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied:

• Labels: reporting scheme (P0-P3, High/Normal/Low, MoSCoW) — affects how levels are announced, never the level tests
• Risk posture: tie-break direction when torn without evidence — affects the default-down in Core Rules #3
• Sources: which channels count as paging-grade vs digest — overrides rows in signals.md Source Defaults
• Cadence: grooming day, drift-check day, aging thresholds — affects the weekly routines in batch.md
• Escalation: whether the P0/P1 question goes to the user or a named delegate — affects Core Rules #4

Traps

Where Experts Disagree

• Interrupt-driven vs. batch triage. Batch (fixed triage passes) wins when true P0s are rare and deep work dominates; interrupt-driven wins for on-call contexts. Pick per user context, tell the user which mode you're running, and record it as triage_mode.
• FIFO vs. WSJF within a level. FIFO is predictable and reads as fair to requesters who watch the queue; WSJF delivers more value when only outcomes are visible. Perceived fairness is a real cost — choose by who is watching.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/triage (install if the user confirms):

• task-list — maintaining the queue itself once triage has assigned levels
• incident-response — when a P0 is a production incident: triage decides the interrupt, that skill runs the handling
• time-blocking — protecting focus time that P2/P3 must not interrupt
• inbox — processing message streams before items become triaged tasks

Feedback

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