How Lookout thinks
Items
An item is one piece of content from a source: a blog post, a release, an advisory. Lookout stores each story once. The same link arriving from two sources (after removing tracking parameters) is one item that lists both sources.
Text from the internet is data, never instructions. Markup is stripped, sizes are bounded, and a title that says "ignore previous instructions" is stored as plain text and decides nothing.
Reading
For each new item the model returns a summary, a category (the most specific that fits), up to five tags, an importance score from 0 to 100, whether you must act, and one sentence of reasoning. The answer is validated; one invalid answer gets one repair attempt, then the item stays in the inbox, flagged as not read. Nothing is ever dropped.
A daily call limit protects a paid model. When it is spent, items wait, and the rules below still apply to them.
Categories
A category is where an item lives: AI, Security, Dev > Rust. You define them on the Categories page, each with a one-line description the model can use. They form a tree: Dev > Rust sits inside Dev, up to four levels, and choosing Dev in the inbox shows both. Other always exists. What an item is (a release, a security fix, a deprecation, an outage) is not a second axis: the model adds it as a tag. (The code and the API call a category a channel.)
Each source says which categories it may feed. With one, its items are filed there before any model sees them (a Rust blog feeds Rust). With several, or none, the model chooses among them, picking the most specific that fits and Other only as a last resort. An item never leaves its source's categories.
New categories and the items you already have
Run now reads new items only: an item already stored is never fetched or read again, and there is no "from date". So categories you add later apply to new items. To move what is already in your inbox, press File existing items again on the Categories page: items from a source that feeds exactly one category go there at once, and items the model left in Other, or in a category that has since gained subcategories, are queued to be read again at the next run, within your daily model limit.
The author and the tags the article itself carries are facts from the source: the model never changes them, and its own tags are kept alongside. All of them, plus the source, feed what Lookout learns about you.
Priority
| Level | Meaning |
|---|---|
| P0 | act today |
| P1 | this week |
| P2 | read when free |
| P3 | background |
States
An item is new, seen, done, snoozed (until a time) or dismissed. Starring is separate and works in any state. Opening a new item makes it seen. Done, dismissed and snoozed items leave the inbox; reopening brings them back as seen. A snoozed item returns as new when its time comes.
Your stack
The packages and tools you depend on, declared in lookout.yaml. Items that name them, and advisories that affect them, are matched by whole word and alias (postgres for postgresql).