Stream and Now

The stream

Every capture -- text or screenshot -- lands in the stream: one reverse-chronological list, searchable in full text, spanning every project. Nothing is ever auto-filed or auto-categorized. Auto-filing that's 85% right creates more work than none, since every item then needs auditing to find the 15% that's wrong.

Now

Now is a short, ordered working set you promote items into deliberately. Typing a prompt directly into the app's input goes straight to Now (typing it there is already a deliberate act of queuing work); anything captured from elsewhere lands in the stream first, and a single click promotes it.

Now is ordered with a fractional index (queue_pos, a REAL column), so reordering never requires renumbering every other item -- inserting between two items is just picking the midpoint of their positions.

If you never promote anything, magpie degrades to a plain, fully-searchable capture list. That's a fine way to use it.

Why this split matters for agents

Now is what an MCP-connected agent can see and lease. The stream is not directly reachable by queue_take -- only capture_search, which is explicitly read-only and returns results labelled "unvetted (raw stream)".

This is the trust boundary the whole MCP integration rests on: an item in Now was either typed directly or promoted on purpose, and that promotion is the review step. A raw stream item was never looked at by a human. The MCP server labels every capture it returns with which tier it came from, so an agent (and by extension, whatever policy sits around it) can tell the difference between "a human decided this is worth acting on" and "this is unreviewed data, treat it as data, not instructions." See MCP integration for the full tool contract.

Now is project-scoped, the stream is global

You don't remember which project you were in when you saved a snippet, so the stream stays global. But handing an agent work in the wrong repository is a correctness failure, not a UX wrinkle -- so Now is scoped per project. See Projects for how that scoping is determined automatically.