Briefs

Three times a day Pepper sends you a short brief on Telegram: what to start with, what needs you, and what got done since the last one.

By default briefs come at 07:00, 13:00 and 19:00 in your timezone. The time decides whether you get a morning, midday or evening brief, and two of them carry something extra:

Just before each scheduled brief, Pepper tries to pull new messages and read them for follow-ups. If that fails, or the spend cap is reached, the brief still goes out, built from what is already stored.

If Pepper was down at brief time, the brief still goes out when it comes back within 90 minutes, as long as it is still the same day. After that the slot is skipped. A brief that went out is not sent again.

Want one now? Send /brief. It uses what is already stored, without pulling new messages first.

From top to bottom:

• A headline. One sentence on where to start and why. Pepper may mark one item with ▶ as the place to begin. The headline is the one part written by the AI model, so if the spend cap (your daily limit on what Pepper spends on the model) is hit, the headline is left out and the rest still arrives.
• Priorities. In your order. If you have none, the brief says how to add one.
• Yours. Tasks you told Pepper to track that are due within a week, then up to three undated ones, five in all by default. Tasks in the evening check-in are listed there instead. Use /tasks to see the full list.
• Needs you. What you owe people, found in the chats you connect, most pressing first. Each line has the person when known, what's owed, a due date if there is one, and a short quote from the message when Pepper kept one. People you set as VIPs are marked ★.
• Waiting on others. How many things are owed to you, with the two oldest named.
• Check-in (evening only). "Did you…?" for up to five of your own tasks that came due, by default. A task that has had its last check-in is left out.
• Closed since last brief. Up to five things that got done, each with a short quote from the message that closed it, when Pepper kept one.
• A footer. Meetings from Tactiq, unread threads older than two days, possible items waiting in Review, the page where you keep or reject what Pepper found, facts and decisions Pepper learned, and today's and this month's spend.

A brief shows five items in Needs you by default. When there are more, it says how many and points you to the dashboard. There's no calendar section yet: Pepper can't see your calendar, only meetings recorded through Tactiq.

The items in Yours, Needs you and the Check-in are numbered in one sequence, so you can act on them in two ways. Priorities have numbers of their own, and those don't work here.

Tap a button. Under the brief there's a row of buttons for each numbered item:

Each action button works once and expires after three days; Listen can be used again. If the item changed since the brief was sent, Pepper won't act on the button and asks you to refresh, so an old brief can't undo a newer change. A reply to an old brief has no such check.

Reply to the brief. Swipe to reply in Telegram and write a short answer:

2 done
3 not a task
1 snooze a week
4 friday

A date like friday or oct 30 at 3pm sets a new due date. In the evening check-in you can also answer not yet, tomorrow or drop. "No" always means not yet, never drop. After you answer not yet twice for the same task, the next check-in asks once whether to keep it, give it a date or drop it, then stops asking. Giving it a new date starts the count again.

The order in Needs you comes from a fixed score, not from the AI model:

• Due within a day, or overdue, counts most.
• A VIP counts next. See People for how to set one.
• Due within three days counts a little.
• Something you said you'd do yourself ranks above a request from someone else.
• Items move up the list as they get older, for up to two weeks.

The headline uses your priorities to pick where to start. Only you write priorities. Add one in Telegram:

priority: Close the Q4 plan with Dana Reyes; next: send her the draft

Or use Add a priority on the dashboard's Follow-ups tab. You can have up to seven at once. /priorities lists them.

The times live in .env, the settings file on the Mac that runs Pepper. You edit two lines:

PEPPER_TZ=America/Los_Angeles
PEPPER_DIGEST_TIMES=07:00,13:00,19:00

Use 24-hour times, separated by commas. Fewer times means fewer briefs. Then restart Pepper:

launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.pepper.agent

To stop briefs for a while, send /halt. That pauses Pepper's scheduled work, briefs included, until you send /resume, and /brief answers "Paused" too. Your routines, the scheduled jobs that run without the model, keep running. There is no switch for briefs alone.

On Sunday from 09:00 you also get a weekly review: how many items got done, how many Pepper found and how many of those you marked not a task, the five oldest items open for over two weeks, and the week's spend. When Pepper found at least ten items and more than one in five were marked not a task, it gets stricter about which items it opens on its own, until it next restarts.