Priority Rules Engine

The Priority Rules Engine lets you define custom rules that shape how your Sidekick agent triages and responds to events across all your connected services. Rather than relying solely on the agent's default behavior, you can express your own preferences and work style as explicit, ordered rules.

Overview

Sidekick processes a continuous stream of events — incoming messages, emails, calendar invites, repo notifications, and more. The Priority Rules Engine sits in front of the agent's response layer and evaluates each event against your personal rule set before deciding how (and how urgently) to act.

What You Can Do With Rules

• Set response deadlines — e.g. always reply to messages from a specific person within 5 minutes
• Suppress noise — e.g. ignore all marketing emails
• Escalate critical events — e.g. treat any failed CI run on main as high priority
• Route by source — apply different handling based on the sender, platform, label, or content

How Rules Work

Rules are evaluated in the order you define them. The first matching rule wins — subsequent rules are not evaluated for that event. If no rule matches, the agent falls back to its default triage behavior.

Each rule consists of:

Field	Description
Condition	What to match — sender, subject, platform, keyword, label, etc.
Action	What to do — respond urgently, defer, ignore, escalate, etc.
Response window (optional)	A time constraint, e.g. "within 5 minutes"

Example Rules

Respond quickly to a specific contact

IF  message.sender = "alice@example.com"
THEN  respond within 5 minutes

Ignore marketing emails

IF  email.label = "Marketing"
    OR email.subject contains ["unsubscribe", "% off", "limited time"]
THEN  ignore

Escalate CI failures

IF  github.event = "workflow_failed"
    AND github.branch = "main"
THEN  escalate immediately

Rule Ordering

Rule order matters. More specific rules should be placed above more general ones. You can drag and reorder rules from the Priority Rules panel in the Sidekick dashboard.

Scope

Rules apply across all connected integrations. Any service that delivers events to Sidekick — chat platforms, email, calendar, dev tools, smart home, and others — is subject to your priority rules.

Fallback Behavior

If an event does not match any rule, Sidekick uses its built-in triage logic: it weighs sender history, content signals, and urgency cues to decide how to respond. Priority rules override this logic for matched events only.