GAL-1003 - The Anatomy of the Review Inbox

Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-12. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.

The Anatomy of the Review Inbox

Summary

An architectural breakdown of Galley’s holding stage. Imports land in an isolated state where confidence scores, structural ASTs, and raw source payloads can be inspected before committing to SQLite.

When raw markup or pasted notes are ingested, they do not touch the local database tables that hold your personal recipe collection. Instead, Galley routes every new import into an isolated holding stage known as the Review Inbox. This quarantine layer guarantees that malformed web data, broken character encodings, and incomplete extractions cannot corrupt verified library records.

The Review Inbox acts as an ergonomic inspection deck where cooks verify parsed fields against the raw source document before canonizing the entry.

Staged Lifecycle States

Every item entering the Review Inbox progresses through a deterministic finite state machine:

                  ┌──────────────┐
                  │   INCOMING   │
                  └──────┬───────┘
                         │ (Parser Execution)
                         ▼
                  ┌──────────────┐
                  │    STAGED    │
                  └──────┬───────┘
            ┌────────────┴────────────┐
   (Reject) │                         │ (Approve)
            ▼                         ▼
     ┌──────────────┐          ┌──────────────┐
     │  DISCARDED   │          │  COMMITTED   │
     └──────────────┘          └──────────────┘

1. Incoming: Raw payload stored on disk, pending background AST extraction.
2. Staged: Parsed into structured draft entities with confidence ratings attached to each field.
3. Committed: User has verified or modified the fields; the recipe moves into the permanent SQLite catalog.
4. Discarded: Staged draft rejected and purged without modifying library tables.

Storage Isolation in SQLite

Galley uses separate tables within SQLite to preserve boundary isolation between staging and verified data:

-- Isolated holding stage for raw imports
CREATE TABLE staged_inbox (
    id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
    source_url TEXT NOT NULL,
    captured_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    raw_payload TEXT NOT NULL,
    parsed_json TEXT NOT NULL,
    confidence_score REAL NOT NULL,
    review_status TEXT CHECK(review_status IN ('pending', 'flagged', 'approved', 'rejected')) DEFAULT 'pending'
);
 
-- Canonical library table, written only upon explicit operator approval
CREATE TABLE canonical_recipes (
    id TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
    staged_origin_id TEXT,
    title TEXT NOT NULL,
    servings INTEGER,
    prep_time_minutes INTEGER,
    cook_time_minutes INTEGER,
    created_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    FOREIGN KEY(staged_origin_id) REFERENCES staged_inbox(id)
);

By decoupling the staging schema from the canonical catalog, parser updates and experimental tokenizers can be tested against staged data without putting the primary recipe database at risk. If an experimental parser update introduces a bug, only the staging table holds the affected drafts. Verified records remain untouched.

Dual-Pane Inspection Ergonomics

The Review Inbox interface is structured as a synchronized dual-pane inspection deck. The left pane presents the raw incoming source document—either the sanitized HTML text, an imported Markdown draft, or plain text pasted from a notebook. The right pane renders editable structured fields with inline confidence indicators.

When an operator focuses on an ingredient line in the right pane, the left pane automatically scrolls to and highlights the corresponding paragraph in the original source. This visual grounding eliminates context switching and lets the cook verify prep notes or yield numbers without hunting through long web documents.

Ergonomic Verification Controls

Reviewing imported recipes must not feel like tedious data entry. Galley provides keyboard shortcuts that allow rapid verification:

• Tab / Shift+Tab: Jump between low-confidence fields.
• Ctrl+Enter: Approve recipe and commit to canonical storage.
• Ctrl+D: Discard staged import.
• Space: Toggle side-by-side view of original source text alongside parsed fields.

This workflow turns raw web imports into durable, pristine personal notes in seconds while maintaining complete operator control.

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• Directus Target: galley
• Garden Source Reference: Review Inbox Specification, SQLite Schema, Field Trust Scoring, MOC - Culinary & Domain Workspaces, MOC - The Kitchen Chaos Factor, MOC - Bosun PKM Tools