brain_pending existed the whole time four real items sat unreviewed from
2026-04-23 to 2026-07-15. The tool was never the gap — nothing ever
prompted anyone to call it. The system should be what remembers the queue
exists.
Option 2 from the issue: ride along with brain_context, which sessions
already call, so noticing an aging note costs nobody a decision to go
looking. No scheduled job, no ntfy wiring, nothing new to keep running.
Threshold-gated at 14 days, and silent below it — a notice on every
context call is one people learn to skip, which reproduces the original
failure with extra steps. It reports the whole queue once it speaks: the
threshold decides whether to talk, not what to count.
It never promotes, rejects or reorders. Age is a reason to ask a human,
not a verdict; an old note may be exactly right to promote once someone
looks. A test asserts the queue is untouched and that the payload carries
a hint rather than an action.
An unreadable raw/ dir degrades to silence — brain_context is a hot path
and must not fail because the review queue is broken.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
