A signal is not detected. It's said.
Nothing runs on a schedule in StratOps, and a signal is exactly as automatic as everything else here — which is to say, not at all. It exists for the pattern you've noticed twice but wouldn't yet call a fact.
Four tools, none of which call themselves.
Of the tools in StratOps, these four are the whole lifecycle of a signal. Nothing outside a conversation touches any of them.
- create_signalYou notice something that isn't a fact yet, only a repetition, and say it.
- list_signalsReading them back is free — like every read tool here, it never asks for a permission prompt.
- dismiss_signalThe pattern turned out to be nothing. Closed, honestly, as noise rather than left ambiguous.
- promote_signalThe pattern held up. It becomes an idea, a task, or a decision, and the signal is the thing that led there.
Weaker than an observation, on purpose.
An observation is a fact, recorded because it happened. An idea is a proposal, recorded because you might do it. A signal is neither. It exists so you don't have to decide "is this real yet" before you're allowed to write it down at all — you can say a thing looks like a pattern, and let it sit, unresolved, until it either turns into something with a name or gets dismissed as three coincidences that weren't one.
That in-between state is the entire reason the tool exists separately from an observation or an idea. Forcing every half-formed hunch into one of those two categories early would mean either inflating it into a fact you're not sure of, or letting it drop because it wasn't ready to be a proposal yet. A signal lets the uncertainty be the honest state, instead of a rounding error absorbed into a category that doesn't fit.
What doesn't happen
No checker polls anything. No cron job notices a pattern and files a signal on your behalf. StratOps names this limit plainly elsewhere: you can configure an alert and it will be stored faithfully, and it can never fire, because nothing exists to fire it. Signals are built the same way — every one in the record got there because a person typed the sentence.
How many signals are sitting undismissed right now is a real question, and this page doesn't answer it. Not because it's hidden — because nobody checked it before writing this page, and printing a figure nobody checked is precisely the thing this site refuses to do everywhere else. Observations get a real number: 190 captured, 0 triaged. Ideas get a real number: 51 captured, 2 acted on. Signals don't get one here, and that absence is the more honest choice than a stale placeholder would have been.
Dismiss and promote are triage by another name — the same closing act that observations mostly don't get and ideas rarely do. Nothing about calling it a signal instead of an observation changes what it takes to close one: a person, deciding, on purpose.