A triage gate for everything coming in
One folder on the desktop, and a filing clerk that asks how sensitive a thing is before it asks what it is — and never moves anything without approval.
I built a single drop-folder on my desktop with an AI triage step behind it. The design choice that matters: it sorts by sensitivity first, refuses to auto-route anything confidential, and never files anything without showing me the plan first.
Everything that comes in — a document, a PDF, a downloaded file, a note — has the same problem: deciding where it should go is friction, so it piles up. The fix is to remove the decision at capture time. There's one folder on my desktop. You drop things in it and forget them. The triage happens behind it.
How it works
A drop-zone folder, and an AI step that reads what lands there, works out what each item is, and proposes where it should go and what it should be called — deduplicating along the way (it fingerprints files, so the same thing dropped twice isn't filed twice) and sampling large PDFs rather than choking on them.
The two design choices that matter
Both are about restraint, and both are deliberate.
It sorts by sensitivity first. The first question isn't "what is this?" — it's "how sensitive is this?" Financial, family, legal, health and client-confidential material is identified up front, and there's a hard rule: high-sensitivity material is never auto-routed into the general workspace or anywhere it could leak. It's only ever proposed to a safe, appropriate destination. The safe default for anything sensitive is to do nothing clever with it. I tested this on a batch of genuinely sensitive personal documents — the whole batch was correctly held as high-sensitivity and kept out of the workspace, exactly as intended.
It proposes; it never just acts. The tool never moves, renames or files anything on its own. It shows the plan — destination and new name for each item — and waits for approval. Nothing is irreversible, nothing happens behind my back. For a tool whose whole job is touching files, that propose-then-approve gate is the difference between a helpful clerk and a liability.
Why it's here
This is the unglamorous, load-bearing kind of AI work: not a flashy demo, but a tool that earns trust by being careful with the things that matter. The instinct — sort by sensitivity before anything else, and never let automation act unsupervised on confidential material — is exactly what a business needs at the front door of its own information.