# Needs You

Needs You is the single list of things wanting a person: decisions held for approval, and operational problems such as a mailbox needing reconnection or a phone line in poor health. It is ranked rather than chronological, and nothing is ticked off by hand — an entry disappears when the thing causing it has been resolved.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/needs-you, #/approvals
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you/

## One list, two kinds of entry

**Decisions** — Anything held under `ask_before_send`: a prepared reply, a queued call. These are also on Waiting For You, which is the decisions-only view of the same work.
**Operational problems** — Things stopping Connect working properly — an integration that needs reconnecting, a phone line whose health has degraded, a channel that cannot send. Nobody approves these; they are fixed.

Keeping both in one place is deliberate. A workspace that reads only its approval queue can spend a morning releasing replies while a mailbox has been disconnected since Tuesday and nothing has been read from it at all. The ordering puts the second problem above the first, which is the whole argument for ranking the list.

## Entries clear themselves

There is no dismiss button, and that is the design rather than an omission. Every entry drains by itself as its cause clears: decide the held item and it goes; reconnect the mailbox and it goes; let the line recover and it goes. What you cannot do is make the list shorter without making the situation better.

| Entry | Cleared by |
|---|---|
| A held reply or call | Releasing it or declining it |
| A mailbox needing attention | Restoring the connection or the credentials |
| Voice line health | The line recovering, which the engine re-checks on its own |
| A channel that cannot send | Configuring a provider that can carry it, or setting the channel `off` deliberately |
| A capacity stoppage | The ledger resetting, or a change of plan |

> **Note** Because entries are derived rather than stored as tasks, the list is always a description of the present. An item you remember dealing with yesterday and see again today is a fresh occurrence of the same cause, not a stale row nobody cleaned up.

## Voice line health, and why it escalates here

A degraded phone line is not visible in any conversation. Nothing looks wrong: calls simply do not connect, or connect badly, and the first evidence is often a customer mentioning it days later. Line health is therefore surfaced into this list directly from the voice engine, for both the Owner and customer workspaces through the same code path.

Treat it with the priority the ordering gives it. A line problem is upstream of every commitment on that channel: due call-backs are being retried against a line that is not ready, and a call-back more than a day late is closed as missed rather than made.

## Working it well

1. Read from the top rather than filtering.
   - Result: The ordering already encodes urgency, exposure and how long something has been waiting — see [How Needs You is ordered](/docs/autonomy/needs-you-ranking/).
2. Fix operational entries before working decisions.
   - Result: A disconnected mailbox makes every decision below it less complete, because the newest messages are not there to answer.
3. If the list is empty, believe it.
   - Result: An empty list means nothing is currently held and nothing is broken. See [Needs You is empty](/docs/troubleshooting/needs-you-empty/) if that seems unlikely.

## Questions

### How is this different from Waiting For You?

Waiting For You is decisions only. Needs You is everything wanting a person — the same decisions plus the operational problems, ranked together so that a broken integration is not buried under a hundred approvals.

### Can I dismiss an entry I do not intend to act on?

No, and the reason is that entries are derived from live state rather than created as tasks. Dismissing one would hide the cause without changing it. The way to remove an entry is to resolve or decide the thing behind it.

### Do the Owner and a customer see the same list?

Yes — the same implementation renders both, including the voice line health entries. What differs is the workspace whose state is being described, and the plan limits that can appear in a customer's list.

## Related

- [How Needs You is ordered](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you-ranking/)
- [What appears in Needs You](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you-kinds/)
- [Approvals](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/approvals/)
- [The decision log](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/audit-trail/)
- [Needs You is empty and something is wrong](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/troubleshooting/needs-you-empty/)
- [Working the Needs You queue, end to end](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/workflows/needs-you-triage/)

## What this page is based on

- Connect source pack §5 — Needs You, ranking and voice line health (`docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md`)
- Connect capability registry (`docs-source/facts.py`) — `needs_you`, `line_health`, `mailbox_health`
- `backend/app/operator_ui.py` — the shared renderer for both audiences
- `backend/app/voice_engine.py` — `line_health`