Work begins as captures taken where things happen, a meeting, a chat, a log, a pull request, by adapters that run unattended, so development is fed by what people and systems say rather than by tickets someone remembered to write.
A capture is one source event as recorded: a meeting, a day of a chat channel, a log run, a forwarded message. It holds where it came from, when, who captured it, and a pointer to the raw material, which stays outside version control. Capturing the same event twice yields one capture (Flywheel Next statement, clause 111).
Capture costs no more than a sentence: a forwarded message, a word on the phone, a file dropped in a folder, a key on the page (clause 112). Nobody is asked to classify what they wrote.
An adapter is what makes capture automatic. It enumerates a source’s events and writes one capture per event, unattended. Reading a capture into signals is judgment, so a session does it and nothing does it unattended (clauses 115 and 215). The adapters cover a chat forward, a meeting transcript, a log or monitor webhook, a pull-request conversation, an issue tracker and a folder drop.
Curation then moves every signal. It attaches the signal to an open intent, challenges a standing claim, joins a proposed intent, marks it answered, routes it to a chore, or drops it with a reason. An unmoved signal is never discarded (clauses 116 and 118).