Review and Approve Worklogs Before They Post to Jira

Use the Worklogs view in the Meridian dashboard to review, edit, and approve drafted worklogs — the only path that posts time to your tracker.

Meridian’s PM-worklog stage synthesises one worklog per ticket per hour from your classified sessions. Nothing reaches Jira automatically. The daemon only ever drafts worklogs; you review, edit, and approve each one in the dashboard’s Worklogs view, and a separate post sweep writes the approved entries to Jira within about a minute.

Use this guide when you want to keep an automated record of your time without giving up the final say over what lands on a ticket.

When to use this

Turn to the Worklogs view if you want to:

• Capture per-ticket time logs from your real activity without writing them by hand.
• Keep a human in the loop — every comment posted to Jira is something you explicitly approved.
• Edit auto-generated comments before they go out, or dismiss drafts that don’t represent useful work.

The flow assumes Jira is already connected. See Connect Meridian to Jira Cloud if you haven’t set up the connector yet.

The drafted → approved → posted state machine

Every worklog moves through a small set of states:

drafted ──(UI edit)──▶ drafted ──(UI approve)──▶ approved ──(post sweep)──▶ posted
                                                    │
                          terminal (empty / < 60s)  └──▶ failed

State	What it means
drafted	The hourly driver synthesised a worklog from your sessions. It is not in Jira. Edit it, approve it, or dismiss it.
approved	You approved the draft in the Worklogs view. It is queued for the next post sweep but has not been posted yet. You can still un-approve it to hold it back.
posted	The post sweep wrote the comment to Jira. The state is terminal; Meridian records the Jira worklog ID alongside the row.
skipped	You dismissed the draft. It will not be posted and the hour is considered handled.
failed	The post sweep tried to write to Jira and got an error (auth, network, validation). The error is shown on the card; fix the cause and re-approve to retry.

Approval is the only way a worklog reaches your tracker. A driver re-run can never clobber an approved or posted row, so a human decision is never silently overwritten.

time_spent always comes from your actual idle-discounted activity for the hour (capped at one hour). The language model writes the comment, not the duration.

The Worklogs view

Open the dashboard at http://localhost:3000 and select Worklogs in the sidebar (keyboard shortcut 4).

The header shows the day you’re reviewing and a running count of drafts, approved, and posted worklogs. Use the ← / → arrows to step through previous days; you can’t step past today.

Each worklog is rendered as a card containing:

• The ticket key, the hour the worklog covers, and the time spent in that hour.
• A confidence ring and any risk flags raised during synthesis (e.g. low_confidence, thin_evidence).
• The editable comment that will be posted to Jira.
• Optional supporting detail — the underlying bullets and suggested next steps — collapsed by default behind show supporting detail.
• The current state badge (Draft, Approved, Posted, Dismissed, Failed).

The view polls every 30 seconds, so when the post sweep flips an approved row to posted (or failed) you’ll see it update without reloading.

Approving, editing, and dismissing drafts

Each card on a non-posted worklog has three actions:

Approve → post

Marks the worklog as approved. The post sweep picks it up within about 60 seconds and writes it to Jira.

Edit

Opens the comment in an inline textarea. Saving re-drafts the worklog (you’ll need to approve it again before it posts). The edited badge appears on cards you’ve touched.

Dismiss

Marks the worklog as skipped after asking where the time should have gone — see Dismissing a draft and correcting attribution.

If a card is already approved but hasn’t posted yet, the primary button becomes Hold (un-approve) so you can pull it back before the next sweep.

When every draft on the page looks good, use Approve all N drafts at the top of the view to approve them in one click. Empty drafts (no synthesised comment) are skipped automatically.

Dismissing a draft and correcting attribution

When you click Dismiss on a draft, the card expands into an attribution picker asking “Where should this time have gone?”. You’re not just rejecting the worklog — you’re labelling what the classifier got wrong. Pick one of:

• Another open ticket — the work belonged to a different task. Meridian records the corrected task_key as the ground truth for that hour.
• Untracked / personal — the activity wasn’t billable work at all. Meridian records that the hour should not have produced any worklog.
• Just dismiss — not sure — you don’t have a clear answer; the worklog is dismissed with no attribution label.

After choosing, click Dismiss worklog to confirm. The worklog moves to skipped and the correction is stored alongside the existing edit history as immutable review feedback.

Every approve, reject, and un-approve action is recorded the same way — not just edits — so Meridian retains a complete history of how each draft was reviewed even though only the latest state is shown on the card. This feedback feeds the classifier evaluation pipeline; over time, drafts you reject with corrections help Meridian get attribution right on similar sessions.

No external system is told about the correction — it’s stored locally in your Meridian database for evaluation only.

The post sweep

A background sweep in the daemon runs approximately every 60 seconds and posts every approved worklog it finds to Jira, marking each one posted on success or failed (with the error message) otherwise. This sweep is the sole path that writes to your tracker.

If you can’t wait for the next sweep — for example, you just approved a batch at the end of the day and want them all posted now — run:

meridian worklog-post-approved

The command runs exactly the same sweep on demand and exits when it’s done.

Inspecting the day from the CLI

For a no-SQL summary of a given day, including hours done, pending, and stuck, plus rows grouped by state and a flagged list of low-confidence or risk-flagged drafts to inspect first, use:

meridian worklog-status --day 2026-05-30

Omit --day to see today.

Configuration

The PM-worklog stage runs inside the Rust daemon and uses the MLX server’s synthesis endpoint to write each draft comment. Beyond connecting Jira, you typically don’t need to set anything. A few optional tunables in ~/.meridian/.env:

Variable	Default	Purpose
PM_WORKLOG_INTERVAL_HOURS	1.0	How often the driver runs a drafting pass. Clamped to a 60-second floor.
PM_WORKLOG_MIN_CONFIDENCE	0.65	Below this, drafts are flagged low_confidence for extra scrutiny.
PM_WORKLOG_READINESS_AGING_MIN	90	Maximum minutes the driver will wait for an hour to settle before drafting anyway.

There is no environment variable that enables automatic posting. The previous PM_WORKLOG_POST_ENABLED switch has been removed — approval in the Worklogs view is the only gate.

Troubleshooting

No worklogs appear in the view

Drafts are produced once an hour by the daemon and only for tickets you have classified sessions against. Confirm with:

meridian worklog-status

If hours done is 0, check that meridian status shows the daemon and MLX server running, and that Jira is connected (meridian doctor).

A worklog stays in 'Approved' and never becomes 'Posted'

The post sweep runs roughly every 60 seconds. If a row hasn’t posted after a minute or two, run the sweep manually to surface any error:

meridian worklog-post-approved

If the row flips to Failed, the card will display the underlying Jira error. Fix the cause (commonly a stale API token or a closed ticket) and approve again to retry.

A draft is empty

If synthesis couldn’t produce a useful comment — for example, the hour had too little signal — the draft renders as (empty — nothing to post; edit to add a comment). Approve is disabled for empty drafts; either edit the comment yourself or dismiss the card.