Quick-add syntax

Press C, or the + button. Everything except the words is optional and the order does not matter.

Redraw the empty state !high @ada #WEB *design due:friday

Every token

You type	It means
!urgent !high !medium !low	Priority
!1 !2 !3 !4	The same four, numbered — !1 is the urgent end, the way every tool that numbers them does it
@ada	Assignee, by handle. Repeatable
@"Ada Lovelace"	Assignee, by full name — quotes for anything with a space in it
@me	Yourself
#WEB	Project, by key
#"Public API"	Project, by name
*design	Label. Repeatable
*"needs research"	Label with a space in it
due:friday	Next Friday
due:tomorrow due:today
due:2026-09-04	An exact day
due:+3d due:+2w	Relative — days and weeks
every:weekly every:2w	Repeat. repeat: is a synonym

The words in due: and every: work in English, German and French — due:freitag, every:wöchentlich, due:demain.

The two rules

A weekday always means the next one. due:friday typed on a Friday is next Friday. Somebody typing the name of today’s day means the one coming, or they would have typed due:today.

A token nothing answers to stays in the title. !important is a word; !urgent is a priority. The difference is whether the workspace has something by that name — not whether the token starts with a sigil. The same goes for @nobody, #hashtag and *asterisk.

And an ambiguous @alex, where two people are called Alex, matches neither. Quietly assigning work to the wrong Alex is worse than not assigning it.

The box shows what it read as chips underneath, so nothing is applied invisibly, and the token is still in the line to be deleted.

Why dates need the due: prefix

Reading a bare tomorrow or monday out of the middle of a sentence is what makes this kind of feature magical, right up until Meeting Monday becomes a task called “Meeting” and nobody can see where the word went. A prefix is two characters and is never wrong.

The exception is a relative offset — +3d, +2w — which is not a word in any of the three languages this app speaks, and so cannot be eaten out of anybody’s sentence.

Over MCP

create_task takes an opt-in quick_add string:

{ "quick_add": "Redraw the empty state !high @ada #WEB due:friday" }

title is never parsed. A tool with a schema should mean what the schema says: an assistant that writes “Discuss with @ada” as a title means those words, and a parser that quietly removed them and assigned the task would be a surprise nobody asked for.

quick_add is for the other case — relaying a line a person actually typed. With #KEY in it, the project argument is not needed.