---
title: 'The Desk: the articles that need a decision from you now'
description: 'What the Desk lists, which pipeline states put an article on it, every action on its cards and the idea box, and the MCP tools that do the same work.'
slug: desk
group: app
order: 20
keywords: [desk, decision inbox, brief_ready, ready_to_publish, submit draft, idea box, expand_idea]
related: [drafting-and-verification, publishing-and-attestation, from-your-own-ideas, library]
updated: '2026-10-26'
---

The Desk is the first item in the app's sidebar and the screen to open once you have a project. It answers one question: what needs you right now. It lists only articles waiting on a human decision. Work that is still moving on its own collapses into a single line at the bottom.

## What the Desk shows

The Desk spans every project in every organization you belong to. Each card names the article, its project, how long it has sat in its current state, a source chip (`radar`, `research`, `idea` or `manual`) and a touch-ratio chip: your share of the article's history next to the agent's.

An article lands on the Desk when it is in one of these states:

- **Brief ready**: the brief has forged and nobody has picked it up.
- **Ready to publish**: a draft passed the check and the article waits for its live URL.
- **Draft ready with a flagged check**: the latest submission failed one or more checks. The card shows the gate receipt, check by check, labelled with the destination it was submitted for.
- **Flagged**: publish detection escalated the article, either because a live URL it found does not match the article or because the article has sat in ready to publish for three days without being detected live. The card says which.

Flagged items and failed checks sit under **Needs attention**, above **Ready for you**. Both sections run oldest first. Briefs that are forging or queued behind the daily cap, articles in drafting and articles under review appear only in the in-flight line, never as cards. When nothing needs you, the Desk reads **Inbox zero.**

## Where the data comes from

The Desk reads the article suggestions in your content plans, their stored drafts and their latest gate receipts. It is computed when you open the screen, so it reflects each article's status at that moment. Nothing on the Desk is a separate copy.

## What you can do here

Each card carries the action its state calls for:

- **Get brief** (brief ready): **For Human Writers (PDF)**, **For Agents (Markdown)**, **Open in ChatGPT** or **Open in Claude**. Any of the four moves the article to drafting. The two Open options also carry a compact writing payload into a new chat.
- **Submit draft**: paste a draft to grade it against its brief, the same check described in [Drafting and verification](/docs/drafting-and-verification).
- **Draft** (or **Drafts (N)** when there are several destinations): copy or download each stored draft.
- **Review draft** (failed check) and **Investigate** (flagged): open the article's detail page.
- **Confirm publish** (ready to publish): enter the live URL. [Publishing and attestation](/docs/publishing-and-attestation) covers what that records.

At the top sits the idea box: type one sentence after **What should we write about?** and press **Score it**. It scores the idea against the project picked in the project switcher and shows a title, an angle, related queries, a demand estimate and a niche fit. **Accept & forge brief** adds it to the content plan and starts its brief; **Not for now** clears it. A callout with **Set up MCP** points to the agent route through the same list.

## The same work over MCP

No single tool returns the Desk, because the Desk spans projects. Your agent assembles it from `list_article_suggestions` per project, filtering on status, and `get_account_status`, whose `next_actions` is the ranked cross-project queue. The card actions map one to one:

- **Get brief**: `download_brief_markdown`, or `get_write_handoff` for the compact payload.
- **Submit draft**: `lint_draft`. `get_draft_status` re-reads a stored verdict and draft without spending a check.
- **Confirm publish**: `mark_article_published`.
- **Score it** and **Accept & forge brief**: `expand_idea` and `accept_idea`. [From your own ideas](/docs/from-your-own-ideas) walks through them.