What you are trying to do
You want to glance at your Inbox and instantly know which items need a quick decision, which are reports to read, and which are signals to think about later. Mixing those three together is what makes most notification systems unusable. Sorting them by type is what makes the Inbox actually work.
Every Inbox item in Ship carries a type chip on the left side of its card. The chip tells you two things at once: what kind of thing this is, and what it expects from you. Five types exist. We picked five because the list needs to be short enough to memorise.
The five types
Stuck work is filed when a ticket or pull request has stopped moving on its own and only a human call will restart it. The self-heal routine files most of these. A real example: "PR #213 — no activity 24h+." The right next step is usually to open the linked pull request and either nudge it, close it, or take it on yourself.
Improvement is filed when an agent noticed a pattern — not one instance, but a repeat — that points at something worth changing. The most common shape is "orphan tickets skipped at stage code_review" with a count attached: one tracker project had five tickets miss the same stage. An improvement chip is rarely urgent today, but it usually deserves twenty minutes this week.
Report is filed on a schedule. The daily digest is a report. The weekly audit is a report. A snapshot you asked for via the command line is a report. Reports are mostly read-and-move-on. Marking a report addressed is your way of saying "I have read this and I know where we stand."
Learning capture is filed when an agent finished a run and noticed something worth remembering — a clarification question that keeps coming up, a stage that keeps producing thin output, an unusually clean run worth canonising. Each carries a date in its title — "Learning capture — 2026-05-13." You skim them; the valuable ones become updates to your team's knowledge base.
Daily retro is a special kind of report — the small one your daily-digest routine files every morning. It carries a waiting count badge so you can see at a glance how many of yesterday's retros you have not yet read. Real example: "Daily retro — 2026-05-12 — 30 waiting." That number is your carryover.
How items get here
Most Inbox items are filed by routines: the hourly self-heal pass writes stuck-work items, the daily digest writes the morning retro, the weekly audit writes the assurance report. Some are filed by specialists mid-flow when an agent hits a dead end and would rather escalate than guess. A few are filed by you from the command line when you want to leave a note for tomorrow-you.
Whichever filed it, the chip tells the truth. There is no "miscellaneous" bucket — if something does not fit one of the five types, it does not belong in the Inbox.
How items get routed away from you
Items can be routed to specific people. The tabs at the top let you filter to Mine, Unassigned, or All open. A team running multiple workspaces sees Inbox items scoped to the workspace they are looking at — work from one team does not leak into another's tray.
Routing also happens implicitly. A learning capture about a pattern in repo A references repo A so anyone who owns it can see it is theirs. A stuck-work item names the pull request, which names the author, which names the owner.
What this changes about your week
You scan the chips first, not the headlines. Three STUCK WORK chips means three things stopped moving and need a quick call. Two REPORT chips means there is reading to do. A LEARNING CAPTURE chip means the system has remembered something for you so you do not have to. You spend less time deciding which item to read first because the chip already told you — and the Inbox stops being a thing to dread and starts being a thing you finish.