Team Pulse (Daily Briefing)
Team Pulse is a daily executive briefing that answers one question: "What needs my attention today?"
Unlike weekly digests that summarize past activity, Pulse is forward-looking. It synthesizes signals from across the organization and surfaces the items most likely to need action.
Overview
Pulse runs once per day (configurable) and produces a single briefing per company. It's designed for CTOs and engineering managers who need a quick read on organizational health without digging through dashboards.
Route: /c/:slug/pulse
Cost: ~$0.005–0.02 per briefing (Claude Sonnet)
Signal Collection
Pulse aggregates signals from multiple subsystems before sending them to the LLM for synthesis:
| Signal Source | What It Provides |
|---|---|
| Commit analysis | Yesterday's commit volume, types, and notable changes |
| Slop indices | Contributors or projects with rising AI-generated code ratios |
| Domain ownership | Shifts in who's working where — bus factor changes |
| PR metrics | Cycle time spikes, review bottlenecks, stale PRs |
| Gaming flags | Any new gaming detections since the last briefing |
| Attrition signals | Contributors showing disengagement patterns |
| Velocity trends | Week-over-week velocity changes per squad |
| Alerts | Unresolved alerts (silent contributors, high fix ratios) |
LLM Synthesis
The collected signals are sent to Claude Sonnet with a structured prompt that requests:
1. Headline
A single sentence capturing the most important thing happening:
"Backend velocity dropped 30% this week — 3 contributors on the Payments squad have had no commits in 5+ days."
2. Attention Items
Ranked list of items that may need action, each with:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
title | Short description of the issue |
severity | info, warning, critical |
context | Why this matters, with supporting data |
suggestion | Recommended next step |
3. Positive Signals
Things going well — because a briefing that only surfaces problems creates anxiety. Examples:
- "Platform squad shipped 12 commits with zero gaming flags and 85% test coverage"
- "Cycle time for the API project dropped from 3.2 days to 1.8 days"
4. Trends
Short narrative on week-over-week trajectory for key metrics across the organization.
Generation Process
Pulse is generated by the PulseJob, an Oban background job:
Status States
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending | Scheduled but not yet generated |
generating | LLM synthesis in progress |
completed | Briefing ready for viewing |
failed | Generation failed |
Design Philosophy
Pulse is intentionally proactive and org-wide. It doesn't wait for you to ask a question — it tells you what you should be asking about.
The briefing is also intentionally opinionated. The LLM is instructed to prioritize and rank, not just list. A briefing with 15 items of equal weight is useless. Pulse aims for 3–5 items that actually matter, with the most critical first.
TIP
Pulse complements but does not replace weekly digests. Digests are retrospective summaries of a full week. Pulse is a daily forward-looking check that highlights emerging issues before they become problems in the weekly report.