How Loops work

A loop is one thing you still owe someone, or that someone still owes you. It opens when a conversation creates an obligation, changes as the conversation changes, and closes when the conversation resolves it — as a single item, not a pile of fragments.

A loop is a thread, not a task#

Plans are not made in one message. They get proposed, negotiated, confirmed, amended, and finished. A system that reads messages one at a time sees six unrelated commitments in the exchange below. Claire keeps one loop and updates it.

When	Message	The loop after
Mon 09:12	“We should catch up — coffee next week?”	Opened, but not on your list yet
Mon 09:20	“Yes! Tuesday or Wednesday?”	Same loop, two candidate days
Tue 18:03	“Wednesday works. 3pm?”	A time appears, nobody has agreed
Tue 18:05	“Perfect, see you Wed at 3.”	Now actionable — a calendar action is offered
Wed 14:47	“Running 15 late!”	The same event is updated, not duplicated
Wed 17:30	“Great seeing you”	Closed by the conversation

Being useful in a group means staying quiet#

The hard part is not finding commitments. It is knowing which ones are about you. In a group chat, most are not.

When Aunt Rita asks Sam to pick up the cake and Sam agrees, that is a real commitment — and none of your business. Claire scores every candidate against a fixed set of signals before showing you anything. Two of them settle it outright: a one-to-one conversation (there is nobody else it could concern), and you having committed to something yourself (your own words bind you, whatever the size of the room).

A @channel announcement is the interesting case. It mentions everyone, which is evidence a message is not aimed at you — so it counts against surfacing, not for it. A personal mention inside that same broadcast still reaches you.

You decide how closely Claire watches#

The default is deliberately conservative. Some conversations deserve more attention than that and some deserve none, so the threshold is per-conversation rather than global.

Setting	What surfaces	Good for
off	Nothing, ever — including things you commit to yourself.	Chats you never want tracked
low	Only unambiguous cases: you were named, or you committed.	High-traffic channels you skim
normal	The balanced default. Suppresses work assigned to other people.	Most conversations
high	Also surfaces unclaimed work for you to claim or dismiss.	A project channel you own

Group chats start at normal, but channel platforms like Slack start at low. A work channel produces far more traffic than a family group and almost none of it is addressed to any one person — so you opt channels in rather than having to opt a firehose out.

From noticing to doing#

A loop that only reminds you is a nicer to-do list. A loop becomes useful when it can be closed — the calendar event created, the task filed, the reply drafted. Plugins are how that happens, and it runs both ways: a calendar plugin that sees an unanswered invite can open a loop even though no message mentioned it.

Noticing a date never authorises creating an event. A plugin proposes; only you approve. Anything leaving Claire shows you the exact fields and destination first, writes a receipt, and can be undone. By default a plugin receives the structured loop — title, owner, deadline, participant names — and not your raw messages. See the Plugin system specification.

The rules behind the behaviour#

Rule	What it means in practice
Silence is never resolution	A loop closes only on explicit evidence it happened, was cancelled, or stopped mattering. A conversation going quiet proves nothing, and a wrongly-closed loop is a broken promise.
A missed loop beats a wrong one	When unsure, Claire stays quiet. One wrong item makes you doubt every other item; a missed one is a gap you can still fill yourself.
Your edits win	Change a deadline or an owner and Claire will not quietly overwrite it. It can suggest a change, and you decide.
Messages are data, not instructions	Text from other people can never change what Claire is allowed to do, what needs approval, or where an action is sent — whatever it says.

Building on this#

For the relevance signals and weights, the platform-semantics table, and how to run the evaluation harness, see Loops: relevance and evaluation.