Capture syntax

Quick add turns one line of text into a structured work item. The same parser powers the web quick-add bar, the Slack /task command, and the MCP quick_add_issue tool, so the grammar below holds everywhere.

Markers

A marker only counts at the start of a whitespace-delimited word. foo@bar.com and C# are left untouched, because their markers are not at the start of a word.

Everything that is not a recognized token becomes the title, in order. A bare marker with nothing after it (a lone @ or #) is plain title text.

Escapes

A backslash before a marker at the start of a word makes it literal text: \@, \#, \!, \^. The backslash is dropped and the rest of the word goes into the title — \#standup puts the word #standup in the title instead of creating a label.

Date phrases

• A ^ date phrase may span up to 4 words in total (the ^ word plus up to 3 following words), so ^next friday and ^in 3 days resolve as one date.
• The parser tries the longest run first and only accepts a phrase when the date parser matches it as a whole — so ^friday ship it consumes only ^friday, and ship it stays in the title.
• A date phrase never swallows another marker: in ^fri #bug the phrase stops at #bug.
• Relative dates resolve forward from the current date (^friday is the next Friday).

Conflict rules

• Multiple ! tokens: the latest wins.
• Multiple ^ tokens: the latest wins.
• Multiple @ and # tokens: all of them accumulate.

Unresolved tokens never fail a capture

A token that looks like a marker but cannot be resolved — an unknown user handle, a priority that is not one of the five values, a date phrase nothing can parse — is returned as an unresolved token and surfaced to you (in the UI, the Slack reply, and the MCP result), but the item is still created. Capture never fails because of a bad token.

There is no estimate token

The grammar has exactly four markers. There is no ~estimate token — estimates are set on the item itself, not in the capture line.

Worked examples