The best ideas don't wait for a convenient moment. Now you don't have to either.
Overview
Every developer knows the feeling: you're deep in a problem and something entirely unrelated surfaces — a task you've been forgetting, a feature idea, something a teammate mentioned. The right move is to capture it immediately and return to what you were doing. The wrong move is opening your project board, navigating to the right column, filling in a form, and losing your thread entirely.
Brain Dump is a floating capture panel built for exactly this moment. It lives outside the main Navique window, hovers above everything else on your screen, and stays out of the way until you need it. Type a thought, hit Enter, type the next one. That's it. When you're ready to process, a single tap commits every captured task — with full checklist breakdowns and performer assignments — directly into your chosen project.
Capture messy. Commit deliberately. Keep moving.
Opening Brain Dump
Two entry points, both designed for minimal friction:
From the sidebar — a yellow bolt badge sits in the bottom-right corner of the Navique logo in the top-left of the app. Click it to toggle the Brain Dump panel open or closed. The solid yellow badge is intentionally conspicuous — even a quick glance at the app tells you Brain Dump is one click away.
From the menu bar — Brain Dump is listed in Navique's always-on menu bar popover under a yellow bolt entry labelled "Brain Dump / Quick capture". This means the panel is accessible even when the main Navique window is completely hidden. Navique runs silently in the menu bar when you close the window, and Brain Dump remains available the entire time.
The panel is a floating window. It sits above your other applications without stealing focus from whatever you were working in. Drag it by its header to park it wherever is comfortable — corner of your screen, beside your terminal, wherever fits your setup. Its position and size are remembered between sessions.
The Capture Flow
The panel opens with your cursor already in the input field. There is nothing to click.
Type your thought and press Return. The task animates into the growing list below the input field, and the cursor is immediately back in a fresh, empty field. Type the next thought. Press Return. Repeat. The entire capture session is keyboard-only from the moment the panel opens — mouse not required.
There is no save button, no cancel button, no form to complete. Tasks accumulate in the staging buffer as fast as you can type them.
Project Assignment
A project dropdown in the panel header lets you nominate where the staged tasks should land. All of your active projects are listed. Select "Unassigned" to capture tasks that aren't tied to a specific project yet — they'll land in the global backlog and can be moved later.
The selection persists for the session. If you're in a sprint planning mindset and everything is going into a single project, set it once and forget it. The footer's send button always reflects your current selection: "Send 6 tasks → Navique App" or "Save 3 tasks to Backlog".
Breaking Tasks Down with Checklists
Click any captured task to expand it. A checklist input appears inline — no sheet, no modal, no navigation. Type a checklist item and press Return to add it. The cursor stays in the field. Keep typing items for as long as you need.
Checklist items can be dragged between tasks. Grab the grip handle on the left edge of any item and drop it onto a different task in the list — it transfers immediately, and the destination task expands to show the moved item landing in place.
This lets you capture loosely first ("Refactor auth layer") and then break it down without leaving the dump session ("Extract token validation", "Write unit tests", "Update API docs", "Deploy to staging").
Human or Agent Assignment
Every task and every checklist item carries a performer assignment. Two small icons sit to the right of each row:
- —Person icon — assign to a human team member (default)
- —Sparkle icon — assign to an AI agent
The active assignment is highlighted in its distinguishing colour; the inactive one fades to near-invisible. Tap either icon to switch. This assignment is carried through when the tasks are committed — assignedTo is set on the created task record, so agent-marked tasks surface correctly in the Agent Hub's approval and dispatch queues without any extra steps after the dump.
The default is always human. You opt in to agent assignment intentionally.
The Staging Model
Tasks captured in Brain Dump are not immediately written to your project. They sit in a staging buffer — visible in the panel, held in memory, waiting for your go-ahead. This is deliberate.
A brain dump session is inherently messy. You're offloading, not organising. The staging model separates the act of capture from the act of commitment. Review what you've captured, expand a task into checklist items, reassign a couple of things to your AI agents, delete anything that was half-formed, then commit the whole batch in one action.
A footer bar appears at the bottom of the panel once you have staged tasks. It shows a count of staged tasks, your target project, and a Send button. Tap Send and every staged task is created in the project's backlog in a single operation — each task with its checklist items attached, performer assignments set, and ready to prioritise.
The footer has a dismiss button (×) that hides it without discarding the staged tasks. If you're still mid-dump and don't want the footer in your peripheral vision, dismiss it. The tasks are still there. The footer reappears the next time you add a task.
After sending, the panel confirms the dispatch with a brief success state before clearing. Your project board reloads automatically.
State Persistence
Closing the Brain Dump panel does not clear it. Every staged task — titles, expanded checklist items, performer assignments, project selection — is held in memory for the lifetime of the app session. Re-open the panel and pick up exactly where you left off.
This makes Brain Dump useful as a persistent working buffer, not just a momentary scratch pad. Stage a batch of tasks across the morning, expand them as you think of sub-tasks, then send everything to your sprint at the end of the stand-up.
Designed for Interruption
The most important design principle behind Brain Dump is that capturing a thought should never cost you your current focus. The entire workflow — open panel, type tasks, close panel — takes under ten seconds and does not require you to navigate, click a form, or make any organisational decisions in the moment. Those decisions happen later, when you choose to review the staging buffer.
This is the difference between a tool that supports your thinking and one that interrupts it.