The device budget - 194 docs, one 90-second timeoutConcept

The reMarkable holds 194 documents against a budget of 70, and tonight the weekly retention sweep timed out listing them. The cost of an over-full device is paid on every five-minute poll.

The rm-bridge talks to the reMarkable cloud, not the tablet. To find out whether you tagged something done, rm_pull must list the documents and probe tags. Listing cost grows with document count, and the cloud rate-limits by request volume. 70 was set as the budget after 8-26 because that is roughly where a full listing plus tag probes stays inside the limit with headroom.

Where the 194 come from: 42 FOR REVIEW docs older than four days (mostly application packages from 8-24 to 8-27, five PDFs each), plus REFERENCE library docs, plus accumulating daily PDB briefs and Lessons, all of which now stay until tagged done (your 8-31 hold-by-default rule). The rule is correct for review docs. Its side effect is that nothing leaves the device unless you touch it.

Claude will not prune FOR REVIEW docs on its own: hold-by-default is your ink. Removal goes to device trash (recoverable) and local copies always remain. So the pressure valve is one of three things: you tag done, you authorise a scoped prune (D2 this week), or the budget threshold is raised and the poll interval lengthened. The lesson on 9-14 is about that last choice.

Worked example

See the shape of the backlog yourself (the listing may take a minute):

cd /Users/tom/Claude/PDB
bun scripts/rm-bridge/bridge.ts list 500 > /tmp/rm-list.txt
wc -l /tmp/rm-list.txt
grep -c 'FOR REVIEW' /tmp/rm-list.txt
grep -c 'REFERENCE' /tmp/rm-list.txt
grep -c 'LESSON' /tmp/rm-list.txt
grep -E '^8-2[4-7] ' /tmp/rm-list.txt | head -20

• The 500 limit is mandatory. The default of 10 hid a processed doc on 8-19 and caused a duplicate return the next day.
• The three greps split the count by tag so you can see which class dominates.
• The last line lists August 24-27 sends: the application packages that predate your first briefing ink. Most of those roles are already decided.

Gotchas

• Do not remove docs with rm-bridge yourself to fix the count. Ink on an untagged doc is lost from the return pipeline if the doc vanishes before rm_pull sees the tag.
• The count includes folders' contents, not just My Files. REFERENCE docs are the usual bulk and are safe to prune since local copies exist.
• If the listing itself times out, wait an hour before retrying: hammering a throttled endpoint extends the throttle.