Inbox, Search, and Memory: three views of context

Macro’s Inbox, Search, and Memory all expose the same connected workspace, but they answer different questions. This chapter explains how those three projections work: Inbox decides what deserves attention, Search helps retrieve explicit evidence, and Memory supplies synthesized background for agents. Understanding the difference lets you choose the right path for a task and prevents a common mistake—treating a notification, a search result, or an AI summary as the complete state of the underlying work.

The distinction becomes important as soon as a workspace contains more than a few active conversations. A task assignment may need attention even though the task itself has not changed. A recent email may be easy to find by its words but absent from a nightly summary. A broad question about a project may be answered from Memory without the person remembering which channel or document contains the latest detail. Macro’s value depends on giving each of these needs a suitable projection rather than forcing one interface to do all three jobs.

Inbox answers what needs attention

Macro’s unified Inbox is an attention projection across blocks. It can bring together email from connected accounts, channel messages, agent results, document mentions, task assignments, and shared files. Instead of asking a person to check each source for interruptions, it presents items that may require action in one triage surface. Signal and Noise then separate likely-important items from material that can wait, while previews and keyboard navigation reduce the cost of moving through the queue.

This is a different purpose from storing the work itself. An assignment can appear in the Inbox because someone needs to notice it. The task remains the object that owns its title, properties, assignee, and status. A channel reply can notify a participant without becoming a new task. An agent result can be an Inbox item while its transcript remains an agent-session block. The Inbox gives a person a working order for attention; it does not flatten every source into one record.

Macro’s notification states make this separation explicit. An item can be unseen, seen, or done. Those states describe a person’s relationship to the notification. They are not the same as email read/unread state, email archive state, or the execution state of a task. Marking a task assignment as seen does not complete the task. Marking a pull-request update done clears the reminder, not the pull request. Conversely, a task can reach its completed state while a related notification remains in the queue.

That distinction is easy to overlook because the Inbox is designed to feel like an action list. Its usefulness comes from collapsing the number of places a person has to monitor, but its accuracy depends on the events and sharing rules that feed it. If a document is not shared with a person, a mention in its body may not notify them. If a call is opted out of team memory, it should not be treated as universally available background. If a message is shared into a channel, the resulting notification and the target’s access are still governed by the surface rules described earlier.

Signal and Noise add another layer of interpretation. Signal is meant to identify important items, while Noise collects lower-priority material. Macro’s documentation warns that the AI filter can make mistakes. A person can therefore use Signal as a helpful prioritization surface without treating absence from Signal as proof that something is irrelevant. The Inbox reduces attention cost; it does not outsource judgment about the work.

The ordering can also change the meaning of “recent.” In some documented views, items are ordered by when the person was notified rather than when the underlying content was created or updated. A new comment on an old task can therefore appear under today’s activity. That is useful for triage because it reflects a new demand on attention.