The inbox

What the inbox lists, where its numbers come from, and the stats behind them.

The inbox in the Start section shows how to read it. This page is about what goes in and how the numbers are computed.

What is listed

Section	Contents	Source
Waiting for you	Every card whose gate is set: parked after a check, parked before an outward stage, stuck after retries, or a proposal nobody has promoted. Oldest first.	`card.gate` on each card in `cards.json`
Shipped	Cards that reached the end of their lane this week. `--seen` clears the list.	Cards in the done stage
Numbers	One row per lane.	`codeloop stats` per lane

A card at a gate shows the file the stage wrote, the result of the last check, and the exact commands to type. A proposal shows where it came from and what approving or rejecting does to it. A card at an outward gate says the check has not run yet, because the stage has not.

Questions in the inbox

A stage can ask the owner up to five questions and carry on when they are answered:

codeloop ask c-006 "Which date format for the file name?" --recommended "YYYY-MM-DD"
codeloop answer c-006 1 --accept
codeloop answer c-006 1 "Quarter, as 2026-Q3"

ask records the questions on the card with a recommended answer each, or reads them from a file with ## Q1 blocks. answer records the answer, or accepts the recommendation. The board shows the same questions and takes answers from it.

The numbers

All of them are computed from card events; nothing is logged separately.

Number	How it is computed
human turns per card	Events made by an owner or reviewer, divided by cards.
unattended span	The longest stretch of any card's life with no human event.
cycle time	Mean time from a done card's creation to its last event.
rework	Rejections divided by approvals. Dropping a proposal is not counted as a rejection.
stuck rate	Cards that hit the retry limit at some stage, over all cards.
first pass at a gate	How often the first human decision at that gate was an approval.

codeloop stats prints them for all cards, --lane for one lane, --card for one card, and --compare v1 v2 side by side for two versions of a lane, which is how a promoted lane is judged against the one it replaced.

From the end of the founder's week:

text

all cards
  cards 14, done 9
  human turns per card   1.5
  unattended span        13.42h
  cycle time             6.48h
  rework (rejects/approvals) 0.23
  stuck rate             0%
  first pass at triage/proposals 100%
  first pass at plan/backlog     100%
  first pass at build/spec       100%
  first pass at build/local      100%
  first pass at build/pr         100%
  first pass at build/prod       100%
  first pass at deploy/prod      100%
  first pass at market/copy      0%
  first pass at market/publish   100%
  first pass at analyze/verdicts 100%

The market lane's copy gate at 0% is the number that produced a lane proposal that Friday.

The same list on a board

codeloop serve starts a local web board that reads the same cards and shows the same waiting list, with the card's spec, evidence, mock and questions beside it. --owner lets the person holding the URL approve and reject from the board. Cloud and hosting covers it.

Over MCP

codeloop mcp serves the engine over stdio with the tools inbox, next_up, get_card, advance, approve, reject, task_done, wiki_inject and wiki_capture. The same engine and the same refusals apply. The role comes from CODELOOP_ROLE in the server's environment, never from a tool argument, so a client cannot approve unless the server was started as owner or reviewer. Hosts has the client configuration.