Triage your inbox with an agent

A pile of half-written notes with no tags, no summary, no obvious home — a classic inbox problem. Solomon agents can do the triage pass for you: they read a note, decide what it needs, and propose the change for you to review. Nothing lands until you accept it.

The pieces (grounded in what actually ships)

• Agents live as files: Agents/<name>.md, each with frontmatter (name, model, backend, tools, triggers, auto_accept) and a body that's the agent's instructions.
• Triggers fire on a frontmatter key/value. An agent's triggers list says which frontmatter_key/value pair dispatches it — e.g. adding agent: tag-suggest to a note and saving is what invokes the built-in tag-suggest agent on that note.
• Agents propose, they don't write directly. The propose_change tool (available to every shipped agent) stages a frontmatter_patch (or a body edit) as a pending change — it does not touch the note until you say so.
• You review in the note's right sidebar. Pending proposals show up there with Accept/Reject buttons per change. auto_accept: false (the default on every shipped agent) means even a well-behaved agent still waits for you.

This is the same propose-by-default discipline the MCP write tools use for external agents (Claude Code, etc.) — see the MCP docs for that side of it. Here, the "agent" is a first-party Solomon agent running against your vault.

Solomon ships three triage-shaped agents already

You don't have to write one from scratch to try this:

• tag-suggest — reads a note, looks at how the rest of your vault is tagged, and proposes 2–5 tags (frontmatter_patch: { tags: [...] }). Reuses your existing tag vocabulary rather than inventing new tags.
• summarize — reads a note and proposes a 2–3 sentence summary field capturing intent, not just the first paragraph. Leaves the body untouched.
• librarian — the fuller triage pass: proposes tags, a topic phrase, and a folder_suggestion together (falls back to suggesting inbox/ when nothing existing fits, rather than inventing a new folder). It suggests a folder; it doesn't move the file for you.

All three refuse to churn: if a note's frontmatter already matches what they'd propose, they propose nothing.

Running the playbook

1. Pick your inbox. Any folder of under-processed notes works — a literal Inbox/, or just your most recently created notes.
2. Add the trigger to a note's frontmatter and save:

   agent: librarian
   

   (Swap in tag-suggest or summarize if you only want one of the three behaviors.)
3. Wait for the proposal. The agent reads the note plus a sample of your vault (via vault_search), then calls propose_change with its suggested fields and a short change summary (e.g. "Categorize: tags + topic + folder suggestion").
4. Review it in the right sidebar. Each pending change shows what's changing; Accept applies it, Reject discards it. Nothing is silent — you see every field the agent wants to touch before it lands.
5. Batch it. To triage a whole folder at once, add the trigger to each note in it (a quick pass with multi-select, or scripted via the CLI/MCP note_set_properties tool if you're comfortable driving it that way) — proposals queue up per note for you to work through.

Going further

Nothing stops you from writing your own triage agent — copy one of Agents/librarian.md, Agents/tag-suggest.md, or Agents/summarize.md as a starting point, change its name, triggers, and instructions, and save it as a new Agents/<name>.md. As long as it uses propose_change for its writes, it inherits the same review-before-apply guarantee.

See also

• Solomon's Agents/ folder in your own vault — read the shipped agents directly for the exact instructions they follow.
• [[Agents and skills]] — the concept page behind agents, skills, and the propose/approve loop.
• [[MCP tool surface]] — how external agents (not first-party Solomon agents) get the equivalent propose-vs-force choice via a key's mode.
• [[Query your vault with bases]] — pair a live base view with an agent pass over the same notes.