I build Flash, an open source AI agent that runs in your terminal and in a web UI. It reads my email, texts people, runs background agents (I call them sparks), waits on things for me, and since last week, it can even drive my mouse.
Every morning I had the same problem. Flash had been busy all night and the results were scattered: a spark's report here, a finished wait there, three unread emails, a chat that answered after I closed the tab.
So I gave it a feed.
Hit Alt+B (or Briefing in the sidebar, or /briefing) and Flash goes full screen. One card at a time, scroll-snapped, just like a video feed. Swipe on a phone, j and k on a keyboard.
Each card is one thing that happened while you were away:
Every card gets the same four actions, down the right side:
Reply to the email from Ada about "Can we move Thursday's review?". Say:), and you finish the sentence.
r, o, a and d do the same from the keyboard, and Esc closes the feed with a fade. A rail on the right shows how far you are, and the last card says you're all caught up, with Dismiss all if you just want a clean slate.
A few decisions I'm happy with:
Sparks can work in teams, with a lead, a team chat, and shared rules. With five sparks on a team, five separate report cards were noise.
So a team gets one card, and only when something changed since your last briefing:
Launch crew 2 of 3 with news
Scout: Found two new issues on the repo and labelled both.
Fixer (needs you): The tunnel fix is ready. May I merge it?
3 new messages in the team chat
1 other: nothing new
Open takes you straight into the team chat. Open the briefing again and nothing has changed? No team card. Silence is a feature.
Every chat app makes you choose: edit a message and lose what came after, or start over in a new chat.
In Flash you fork from any reply. You stay in the same chat, it carries on from that reply, and the way it went before is kept. Once a chat has forks, a Forks button appears at the top and shows them as a tree: forks of forks, each under the reply it came from, with its last words and how long it is. Click one to carry on where it left off.
And because trees get messy, every fork has a bin. Delete one and its own forks move up a level. Delete the one you're on and you go back to where it came from. Get down to one fork and the button disappears, because a chat with one fork is just a chat.
"Thinking..." with three dots tells you nothing. Flash's now shows what it's actually doing, each one a little line drawing:
Two confessions here.
First, I originally made these stop motion, choppy on purpose, a few frames a second. It looked charming in a screenshot. After living with it, it felt like the page was lagging. Now every sketch is redrawn on every frame and glides.
Second, "looking" used to be an eye. It looked around. It blinked. It was watching me take screenshots of my own screen. That was creepy, so now it's a camera.
When Flash isn't doing anything specific, the morphs into a different one every ten seconds, including Singularity, a black hole that pulls every dot in and blows them back out. That's on by default now.
+ > From another chat lists every file across your chats, including ones Flash made, like that post your agent wrote yesterday. Pick one and it's attached again./voice listen and /voice speak.
Flash is open source: github.com/Natuworkguy/Flash. All of this is on the dev branch right now.
What would you want in your morning briefing? And would you rather swipe through your inbox or keep reading it top to bottom? Tell me in the comments.