Flows
One job traced through the services it touches. Back out to Level 2 · The Pieces, or go on to Level 4 · Build On It to write your own.
A flow is one complete path from something happened to it was handled.
That's the level Existential is meant to be understood at. Underneath, a flow might touch half a dozen services — but you set it up once and then think about it as a single thing: a recording becomes a transcript, a receipt becomes a budget entry, a file becomes a filed file.
How every flow works
All of them have the same four parts. Once you've seen one, you've seen all of them.
input → judgment → work → output
- Input. A file appears, an email arrives, you talk to your phone, a service fires a webhook, a schedule comes around. Everything ends up as a message in one queue.
- Judgment. One cheap question: is this worth doing anything about? Most things are not — most notes are a grocery list, most files are not receipts. This step is what keeps the next one from running on everything.
- Work. The expensive part, and only for what got past judgment. Transcribe, research, extract, draft, file. Often several steps, each its own message.
- Output. A note, a task, a budget line, a notification — or another message, which starts the next flow.
There is only one queue and one kind of message, so there is only one thing to learn.
It is tempting to wire input straight to work. Don't. A flow with no judgment step runs the expensive half on everything that arrives, and what you get is a folder of unread reports — which is the problem you started with. Being stingy here is what makes a flow worth having.
The four knobs
Those four parts are also the four things you change, and three of them are settings, not code. This is the whole customization model:
| Knob | What it is | How you change it |
|---|---|---|
| Input | What triggers the flow | Pick a trigger: a cron file, a webhook endpoint, a file-processor PATTERN, an inbox drop |
| Judgment | What counts as worth acting on | One line of prompt in cron frontmatter — e.g. TRIAGE_CRITERIA |
| Work | What actually gets done | The name of the routine to chain — e.g. TRIAGE_ROUTINE |
| Output | Where the result lands | A destination setting, or the routine you chained |
Turning one knob does not disturb the others. Swap a notes vault for an email inbox and the judgment and work are untouched; swap "a business idea" for "a house project" and nothing else moves. Note → Action turns all four on one flow, one section each.
Adding a genuinely new flow means writing one more routine, not learning a new system — see Writing a Routine.
The three that matter most
Capture → one place
Anything you throw at it gets picked up, understood, and filed — without you choosing a destination each time.
- Camera → OCR — photograph something, get back its text
- Note → Action — a thought worth chasing gets chased, and comes back with the right questions
Voice → action
Say it out loud and have it turn into something real, without opening an app.
- Recording → Transcription — recordings become searchable, speaker-labelled text
- AutoVoice — Voice Triggers — speak a phrase, trigger a routine
- HAwake — Custom Wake Word — train your own wake word
- HAwake → Home Assistant → Tasker — wake word to phone action, end to end
Money → budget
The most tedious recurring paperwork in most people's lives, handled without attention.
- Bank Alert → Gmail → Budget — transaction emails become budget entries
- Bank Alert → Receipt Split — one charge, split into its real line items
Building your own
Every flow above is a routine plus a trigger — and both are yours to write.
- Writing a Routine is the place to start: the anatomy of a routine script, how to register it, the four ways to trigger it, and how one routine hands work to the next.
- Note → Action is the same material as a worked example — four routines wired into one flow, with sections on swapping the judgment, the work, and the input.
- Build On It is the contract for reaching the stack from outside it: how to send something in over HTTP and how to read the result.
The mechanism underneath most of them — a file landing in storage becoming a running routine — is the File Processor. That is a level-4 page: it explains the plumbing rather than what the system does with it.