Your first brief

Audience

Installer — you’ll do this once, with the exec alongside you or with a dummy transcript, to confirm the loop works end-to-end.

What you’ll produce

At the end of this walkthrough you’ll have:

• A meeting object with its transcript attached.
• A brief (also called a PRD in the schema) drafted from the transcript by the chief-of-staff.
• An approved plan — 2 to 6 steps — fanned out as child tickets.
• A Slack / Teams thread showing the approval flow.

If something goes wrong partway through, each step is re-runnable from the UI — you don’t have to start over.

Step 1: create a project

Projects scope everything. A single workspace can have many projects; meetings, briefs, and tickets always belong to one.

1. Sidebar → Projects → New project.
2. Name it (e.g. “Mobile app redesign”), pick a color swatch, describe it in a sentence.
3. Save.

The sidebar’s project switcher now shows your new project as the active scope. Every list you see — meetings, briefs, tickets — is filtered to this project until you switch.

Step 2: upload a meeting

You have three ways to create a meeting:

• Upload a recording (mp3 / m4a / webm) — Whisper transcribes.
• Paste a transcript — skip transcription, go straight to brief drafting.
• Dial in by phone — Twilio + Gemini Live; real-time. See Voice dial-in.

For the first run, paste a transcript. Copy something real:

PM: I want to redesign the onboarding flow. Signups are flat and the first-week retention is at 22%. I want a new flow, mobile-first, tested with 5 users before we ship. Eng: OK, that’s probably 3 weeks. I want to split it into a design spike first. PM: Fine. Let’s decide by Friday.

Paste this into the text field, click Create meeting. The UI takes you to the meeting detail page.

Step 3: generate a brief

On the meeting detail page, click Generate brief.

The chief-of-staff now:

1. Reads the transcript and any prior project history.
2. Drafts a brief — title, goal, target users, success metrics, open questions, proposed scope.
3. If it has meaningful open questions, posts them to your comms channel (“Hey, before I fan this out, two quick questions…”).
4. Persists the brief as a PRD row in the database.

You now see the draft brief in the web UI, with status Pending approval.

Step 4: review + approve

You (or the exec, in production) review the brief. Two paths:

Approve from the web UI. Click Approve on the brief. This sets the brief status to approved and enqueues a chief_of_staff ticket for plan decomposition.

Approve from Slack. The same message posted to Slack has three buttons — Approve, Redirect, Pause. Tap Approve. The thread updates to “Plan accepted” within 5 seconds.

Either way, the chief-of-staff now decomposes the approved brief.

Step 5: watch the plan land

The decomposition uses the multi-model AI Council (if you’ve configured more than one provider) with self-consistency and a critique-and-revise loop. See Brief generation for the details.

The output is an ExecutionPlan row with 2–6 steps:

1. ba_agent        — User research: 5 onboarding interviews.
2. architect       — Design spike: 3 candidate flows + tradeoff memo.
3. dev_agent       — Implement chosen flow behind a feature flag.
4. qa_agent        — Acceptance test plan + manual run.

Each step becomes a child ticket in the queue. Specialist agents (BA, architect, dev, QA) pull them:

• ba_agent + architect tickets run server-side against your BYOK frontier model.
• dev_agent + qa_agent tickets run on your machine via the AgentHub daemon — code-gen uses your Claude Code / Cursor subscription so production source code never leaves your laptop.

Step 6: follow up

As each ticket completes, the chief-of-staff posts a short update to Slack:

✓ BA research complete (5 interviews summarized). Next up: architect on design spike (ETA 2 hours).

Failed tickets trigger an automatic replan with the failure signature fed back into the next plan prompt. You see this as a new ExecutionPlan row with attempt: 2; the first plan is marked superseded.

What’s happening under the hood?

If you want to understand the machinery you just ran:

• System overview — the moving parts.
• Chief of Staff — how the planner works.
• Project Graph — how code context enters the prompt for engineering-touching briefs.

What if something goes wrong?

Every surface in the loop is replayable.

Thing that broke	Do this
Transcript upload failed	Try again; Whisper occasionally 503s on free tier.
Brief is garbled / weird	On the brief, click Regenerate — it re-runs with a fresh prompt.
Plan has wrong steps	Open the plan, click Replan with a reason. The chief of staff folds the reason into the next prompt.
A ticket failed	The chief-of-staff already replanned. Check the new plan in Activity.

From here: Daily workflow covers what the exec’s week looks like.