Manage the queue and old notes

Everything you add waits in the queue until sb run works through it. This page is about looking at the queue, getting a failed source through, and rebuilding notes. How sources get in is in Get sources in.

See what is queued

sb status

queued: 3
processing: 0
done: 5
failed: 0

State	Meaning
queued	Waiting for a run (also: failed once or twice and will be tried again)
processing	A run is working on it now
done	A note was written, or the source was already in the wiki
failed	Failed three times and is parked until you decide

sb status also lists each parked source with its last error. The names of what is waiting are in today's daily index under Tomorrow's queue (the oldest 20), and sources being retried show there too, under To review, with the attempt number and the error.

sb run scans inbox/ first. To queue what is in inbox/ without running anything, use sb scan.

Run a few at a time

sb run --limit 3

A run stops by itself after max_sources_per_run sources (20), max_tokens_per_run tokens (300,000) or, when you set it, max_usd_per_run (an estimated cost in USD), and says so: Stopped early (max_sources); the rest stays queued for the next run. The rest is not lost: after the nightly run, the next hourly tick runs another batch whenever sources are queued, whatever stopped the last one, up to max_batches_per_day scheduled batches a day (6 by default, the nightly one included; see Run it every night).

Retry a failed source

A source that fails is tried again on later runs. sb run names it and the reason when it fails (! TITLE: attempt 1 of 3 failed, will be tried again: ...). After the third failure it is parked as failed, and the line says so (attempt 3 of 3 failed, parked):

sb status

queued: 0
processing: 0
done: 2
failed: 1
  failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoesNotExist12345 (ExtractError: Could not fetch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoesNotExist12345: Client error '404 Not Found' for url 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoesNotExist12345'
For more information check: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/404)

Read the error, fix the cause, then put it back:

sb retry

Requeued 1 source.

sb retry URL requeues only that one; sb retry with nothing parked prints Nothing to retry. The next sb run tries again. If the cause is not yours to fix (a dead link), forget it:

sb drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoesNotExist12345

Dropped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoesNotExist12345

Common causes and what to do:

Last error	What it means	Do
No readable article content found at ...	The page is a login wall, mostly scripts, or very short	Clip it with the Web Clipper, or sb drop it
Could not fetch ...: Client error '404 Not Found'	The link is dead	sb drop it
Refused to fetch ...: localhost resolves to a non-public address	Only public addresses are fetched, by design	Save the page as a Markdown file and drop it in inbox/
PDF has almost no extractable text (scanned?)	A scan	Turn on OCR and sb retry
... has no readable text (a photo or a diagram?)	An image with no text in it	sb drop it; the worker does not describe pictures
A timeout, or a model error	The model was too slow for this input	Try a stronger model, or raise timeout_seconds; then sb retry

The whole list of messages, by symptom, is in Troubleshooting.

Stop a run and continue later

Press Ctrl-C (or send SIGTERM). What was not finished stays in the queue, and the source that was being read goes back without counting an attempt: it is not a failure. The run says Interrupted: 1 item put back in the queue. and exits with 130 (143 for SIGTERM). A note is never cut in half: if the signal arrives while a note is being written, the run waits until it is whole, then stops. Run sb run again whenever you like; an interrupted scheduled run does not count as that night's run, so the job tries again. sb ingest and sb reingest stop the same way. If the model goes away (The LLM is unreachable (is Ollama running?)), the run stops and nothing is counted against the sources.

Forget a source and add it again

The queue remembers a source as done even after you delete its note, so adding the same link says already known. To redo it:

sb drop https://example.com/post

sb add https://example.com/post

If the note is still in the wiki, sb add skips the link and names the note; to rebuild that note instead, see below, or use sb ingest URL --force.

Rebuild old notes

sb reingest rebuilds source notes from the originals in raw/ with the current pipeline. Use it after an update that says the note format changed, after you switch to a better model, after you change [notes].language, or when a note came out badly. It needs no network. It keeps your read ticks, dates and tags, and keeps every [[link]] to the note valid.

Rebuild every note that is not yet in the current format (format: 2):

sb reingest

Rebuild only the notes whose title contains a word:

sb reingest "Active recall"

[1/1] Active recall versus rereading
    ... synthesis
    ... connections
Vault tagged pre-reingest-2026-10-03 (undo: git -C ~/Documents/Obsidian/esbi reset --hard pre-reingest-2026-10-03)
rebuilt: 1, skipped: 0, failed: 0

Rebuild everything again, even notes already in the current format:

sb reingest --all

With nothing to rebuild it prints rebuilt: 0, skipped: 0, failed: 0 and touches nothing.

Things to know:

• Language. Notes are written in the language the config names when they are rebuilt. Changing [notes].language never rewrites old notes by itself; sb reingest --all rebuilds every note in the new language (concept pages keep a ## Desde or ## From section per source, and the rebuilt note's sections are swapped for ones in the new language; sections of notes you do not rebuild stay as they were). New notes follow the setting at once.
• Undo. Before it touches anything it commits the vault and tags it pre-reingest-<date>. To go back: git -C ~/Documents/Obsidian/esbi reset --hard pre-reingest-2026-10-03 (use your vault path and the tag it printed).
• It replaces the note. Edits you made in the body of a source note are not kept (the note is written again from the original); the git tag has the old version. Tags you added and the read state are kept.
• Resumable. If it stops (the model went away, the Mac slept, Ctrl-C), run sb reingest again: notes already rebuilt carry format: 2 and are skipped. A full rebuild of 24 notes took about 2.5 hours on an 8 GB Mac.
• Needs git. It refuses without a git history, because the undo depends on it.
• One at a time. It takes the run lock, so it will not start while sb run works: Another run is in progress; try again when it finishes.
• A note whose original is missing from raw/ is skipped and listed with the reason.