What you are trying to do
You asked your agent what needs you, and it surfaced an item. Now you have to do something with it. Most tools at this point either leave you with a blunt "mark as read" button or, worse, leave the item sitting until you forget about it. Ship gives you a small set of real dispositions on purpose, and records which one you chose.
The dispositions are resolve, approve / reject, acknowledge, and dismiss. They are not synonyms. The difference between them matters in week three when somebody asks why a thing happened.
Resolve / Mark addressed — you handled it
You resolve an item (the answered disposition) when the thing it was waiting on is done. You merged the stuck pull request. You answered the clarification the specialist raised. You opened the improvement signal, agreed it was a real pattern, and filed a ticket to fix it.
Resolved does not mean "I read it." It means "I took the action that was needed, and this Inbox item should not come back." The system records who resolved it, when, and against which item. That record is the disposition log, and it is what survives turnover and re-orgs.
When an item needs a whole conversation rather than a one-button call, you resolve it after filing a follow-up ticket — Ship logs that you addressed it, and the new ticket is where the conversation continues.
Approve or reject — for gated steps
Approval items carry two actions: Approve and Reject. A gated step is paused on your explicit go-ahead, so there is no "addressed" middle ground — you either let it proceed or you stop it. Both are recorded as real decisions against the item, with an actor and a timestamp.
Acknowledge — for read-only reports
Reports — the daily digest, the weekly audit, the morning retro — are read-and-move-on. A single Acknowledge marks the digest read. It is your way of saying "I have read this and I know where we stand," without pretending you took an action that a report never asked for.
Dismiss — real but no action needed
You dismiss when the item is real but does not require action from you. The most common case is an improvement signal about a pattern you are not chasing this quarter: yes, the agent noticed something, no, it is not your priority right now. Another common case is a daily retro on a quiet day — you read it, nothing was on fire, you move on.
Dismissed is honest. It is not "I lost interest" — it is "I read this and consciously decided not to act." Ship records dismiss as a real decision, with a timestamp and an actor, the same way it records a resolve. A dismissed item does not come back tomorrow.
Where you can make the call
Most dispositions you make from your agent over MCP, or from Telegram. Two guardrails apply. Approving a gated step over MCP requires you to echo the item's exact title back — so nothing auto-approves silently. And any item Ship marks destructive can be approved only on the console /approve page; MCP and Telegram refuse it and send you the link.
Why every disposition is logged
The cost of a decision you cannot retrace is higher than most teams realise. The customer asks why you killed a feature in March; the new VP of engineering asks why a particular control was loosened; the auditor asks who approved a change to a sensitive area. If those answers live in chat, they are gone. If they live in the disposition log, they are one search away.
We log disposition because operations work that is not legible decays into folklore — "I think the previous PM decided that?" — and folklore is what makes the next reorganisation painful. Treat the log like a finance ledger: small entries, made constantly, that add up to a real record of what the business actually did.
What this changes about your week
You stop accumulating Inbox debt. Items get resolved, acknowledged, dismissed — or snoozed when they genuinely belong to tomorrow-you. There is no silent backlog. Because you dispose of them from inside your agent (or, for approvals, the /approve page), the open set stays small without a web tab to babysit.
You also stop arguing about old decisions. Six months from now, when somebody asks why a ticket was dismissed in May, you do not have to remember; you query the log and the answer is there, attached to your name, on the date it happened. That is the version of trust you actually want — not "trust me," but "look at the record."