How Proposals Work

Nothing your team captures is written straight into your documentation. Every capture becomes a proposal that a person reviews first. This article walks through the stages in between, so you understand what's happening when you check on a capture and why it's in the state it's in.

The lifecycle of a capture

1. Capture

Everything you capture enters Docpipe the same way, whatever its source — a /docpipe message, a watched-channel message, or a voice note. Voice notes are transcribed first; the rest move straight on.

2. Understand

Docpipe reads the capture and works out what it is. If it's a question, it's answered from your existing docs instead of captured (see Asking & search). If it's documentation, Docpipe identifies the underlying claim and cleans up shorthand and conversational phrasing so the meaning stands on its own.

3. Locate

Docpipe finds where the knowledge belongs — the right space, the right document, and often the specific block to change. For a watched channel mapped to a space, it stays within that space; otherwise it chooses the best destination across your knowledge base.

4. Propose

Docpipe drafts the smallest useful change that makes the documentation correct:

• An update to an existing block, when the knowledge revises something already documented.
• An insert of a new block, when it's genuinely new.

Each proposed change carries a short rationale (why this change, here) and a confidence score. A single capture can produce one change, or a plan of several changes across one or more documents.

5. Review

The proposal goes to a person to approve, edit, or reject before anything is saved. Where it appears depends on the source (see below). This step is covered in Reviewing proposals.

6. Apply

Once approved, the change is written into the target document and the capture is marked applied. If the target document was verified, applying a change moves it back to needs review so its owner can re-confirm it — see Governance & knowledge health.

Where a proposal shows up for review

• In Slack — captures from /docpipe and watched channels post an approval card with Approve, Edit, and Reject. For a watched channel, the card is a DM to that channel's approver; for a /docpipe command, it appears in the channel where the command was run.
• Voice notes — you review and file your own recordings from My Notes. See Voice capture.

High-confidence captures apply automatically

When Docpipe is highly confident about a small, unambiguous change, it applies the change and posts a confirmation instead of an approval card — for example, "Your capture was auto-applied." The result still appears in the document and in the capture's history, so nothing happens invisibly, and you can review or adjust it afterward.

Following a capture

You can see where a capture ends up without leaving where you started:

• Slack captures — the approval card updates in place to show whether the change was approved, edited, or rejected.
• Voice notes — each note under My Notes shows a plain-language state: Ready, Awaiting review, Filed, or Dismissed.