fix(triage): stop AI from dumping every task into q2 - #80
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Real-world report: a 4-item Mandarin brain dump came back with all four
items classified as q2 ("important, not urgent"), even though one of
them (我要去買菜 — buy groceries) is clearly same-week and another
(我要整理家裡 — organize the apartment) is canonically q4. The matrix
becomes useless as a sorting tool when everything lands in the safest
bucket.
Root cause: the system prompt only defined the four quadrants; it
didn't tell the model how to handle naked intents that lack a temporal
marker. LLMs default to q2 in that case because it's the
least-likely-to-be-wrong label. That's a known failure mode for
Eisenhower-style classifications.
Three reinforcements in the prompt:
1. CRITICAL ANTI-DEFAULT RULE: explicit "do NOT default to q2."
2. Time-marker rules: maps common temporal phrases (今天/明天/一個月)
to their quadrant implications, with Chinese, English, and French
variants so the model spots them across the supported languages.
3. Task-type heuristics: gives the model concrete categories
(groceries → q1/q3, decluttering → q4, career growth → q2, etc.)
with example phrases so it can classify without a deadline marker.
4. Distribution self-check: "if >60% of a batch ≥ 4 lands in q2,
re-examine." A soft sanity rail.
Edge fn still ships JSON in the same shape; only the system prompt
changes. No client changes needed. After this merges, redeploy the
function via Lovable (same way the previous deploy was triggered) so
the live function picks up the new prompt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
The user reported a 4-item Mandarin brain dump where all four came back as q2 ("Important, Not Urgent"), including 我要去買菜 (buy groceries — clearly same-week) and 我要整理家裡 (organize the apartment — canonically q4). The Priority Quadrants board is useless as a sorting tool when everything lands in the safest bucket.
What changed
Only
eisenhowerSystemPromptinsupabase/functions/todo-triage/index.ts. No client changes, no schema changes.Three reinforcements:
After merge
Redeploy the edge function via Lovable (same trigger as the previous deploy). Then the user's same 4-item brain dump should distribute across multiple quadrants:
Test plan
tsc --noEmitclean (edge fn typechecks within the existing build)🤖 Generated with Claude Code