Capture

Everything to be worked on enters through the same door. That door has many inputs — an automated error report, a user request, a client conversation, something noticed mid-build — and it does not care which one it was. What matters is that there is exactly one place where a request lands. Capture records it and nothing more — what kind of thing it is, and whether it will be done, are settled next, at the sift.

A request is whatever arrives at the door. It has been recorded and nothing more: it carries no type, no agreement that it will be done, and no promise to anyone.

One door, and only one. The failure to watch for is a second queue: the moment internal work has a separate route from external work, one of them starves, reliably and always the same one. A single door is also what makes everything downstream traceable — nothing can arrive unrecorded if there is nowhere else to arrive.

Capture is open to anyone. It is not acting on the change, because the change does not exist yet — so a persona raising a request does not thereby become a discipline. Whoever receives a signal, wherever it reaches them, writes it into the door.

Capture carries no quality bar by default, though an application may set one. That is not the same as carrying no ceremony: enough must be provided that the request can be understood by someone who was not there when it was raised.

Four words. A half-formed hunch. A paste of an error nobody has read yet. That is the expected shape of something at New, and none of it is a defect — a thin request is one the sift will have to think about, which is the sift's job rather than the capturer's.

Friction at the door is paid invisibly

A poorly captured request costs one person a few minutes of clarification, once. A door that is hard to open costs every request that was never raised at all — and those leave no trace, so the cost appears in no report. When capture starts to block, ideas and problems stop arriving long before anyone notices they have.