Event-Driven Context Capture? Please help :)

[suprie-raj]

The Goal

I want PAI to maintain awareness of my day-to-day communications and work:

• Emails - Important client threads, commitments made, deadlines discussed
• Calendar - Meeting outcomes, schedule changes, new events
• Project Management - Jira/Asana updates, ticket changes, comment threads
• Comms - Slack threads, Teams messages, document comments

So when I open Claude Code, my DA has full context on what’s happened since my last session and can reference it intelligently.

The Limitation I Hit

PAI hooks are session-lifecycle events (SessionStart, Stop, etc.), not background listeners. MCPs only fetch data when Claude Code is open and calls them.

This means:

• ❌ Email arrives at 2 PM → Hook doesn’t fire
• ✅ Open Claude Code at 5 PM → SessionStart pulls emails since last session

The Question

What’s the recommended pattern for continuous context capture?

Option A: Session-based MCP pulls

// SessionStart hook queries MCPs for "what changed"
const updates = await microsoft365.getEmailsSince(lastSession);
const jiraChanges = await atlassian.searchIssues(`updated > ${lastSession}`);

• ✅ Works within PAI architecture
• ❌ Only updates when I’m actively working
• ❌ Misses context between sessions

Option B: External automation → File dumps

Power Automate / n8n / Zapier:
- Email received → Save JSON to ~/pai-memory/emails/
- Calendar event added → Append to calendar-changes.md
- Jira updated → Write to jira-updates.jsonl
- Meeting transcript → Save to transcripts/

PAI hooks READ these files during sessions

• ✅ Captures events 24/7
• ✅ Works with session-based hooks
• ❌ External system dependency
• ❌ More complex setup

Option C: Hybrid

• Background automation for high-priority events (VIP emails, key meetings)
• Session-based MCP pulls for everything else
• Best of both?

Option D: Something else I’m missing?

Specific Questions

1. Has anyone built continuous event capture successfully? What pattern worked?
2. For Microsoft 365 + Atlassian MCPs specifically - are you doing session-based catch-up, or do you have external automation feeding PAI?
3. File-based approach - If dumping external data to files, what structure works best? JSONL? Markdown? Separate files per day?
4. TELOS integration - How do you map these external events to GOALS.md / PROJECTS.md / CONTACTS.md for prioritization?
5. Memory management - With continuous capture, how do you prevent memory bloat? Keep last 30 days? Summarize older data?

Any examples, code snippets, or architectural guidance would be hugely helpful!

[suprie-raj]

Bumping this. Would appreciate some insight - happy to collaborate. Thanks!

[danielmiessler]

Yes, I'm working on something like a daemon option, similar to the Gateway that OpenClaw has, so that we can have scheduled tasks and push functionality. Thanks for raising this!

[madeinoz67]

openclaw

[danielmiessler]

The right pattern for this is MCP servers — each of those sources (Gmail, Calendar, Jira, Slack) has or will have an MCP server that plugs into Claude Code directly. When an MCP server is connected, PAI can query it inline during sessions. The _INBOX skill (for Gmail) and _CLICKUP skill (for task management) show the pattern in action. For real-time event capture, the Feed skill handles polling sources and routing outputs. It's not fully automatic yet — you need to ask PAI to check sources — but MCP is the architecture that gets there.