Briefings

Scheduled summaries delivered to Talk and/or email. A morning briefing might include today's calendar events, market futures, headline news, and pending todos.

Configuration sources

Briefing config is loaded from three sources (higher precedence wins):

1. User workspace BRIEFINGS.md (Nextcloud file, user self-service)
2. briefing_configs DB table — provisioned via istota briefing ensure (Ansible) or the web UI (/istota/settings → Briefings); enabled=0 mutes a row without scheduling.
3. [[users.alice.briefings]] blocks in main config/config.toml (docker entrypoint shortcut; DB rows win)

Merging happens at the briefing name level.

Components

Component	What it includes
calendar	Today's events (morning) or tomorrow's events (evening)
todos	Pending TODO items from todo_file resources
email	General unread email summary / newsletter content
markets	Pre-fetched futures (morning) and indices (evening) via yfinance
headlines	Pre-fetched frontpages from major news outlets
news	Newsletter summaries from configured email sources
notes	Recent notes summary
reminders	Random item from user's REMINDERS file

Market data and newsletter IDs are pre-fetched before Claude execution so the model doesn't need API access for data collection.

Memory isolation

Briefing prompts intentionally exclude USER.md and dated memories. This prevents private context from leaking into what may be shared or newsletter-style output.

Example config (TOML)

[[users.alice.briefings]]
name = "morning"
cron = "0 6 * * *"               # 6am in user's timezone
conversation_token = "room123"    # Talk room to post to
output = "both"                   # "talk", "email", or "both"

[users.alice.briefings.components]
calendar = true
todos = true
markets = true                    # auto-selects futures (morning) or indices (evening)
news = true                       # expands using [briefing_defaults.news] sources
reminders = { enabled = true }

Boolean expansion

Setting markets = true or news = true in BRIEFINGS.md expands using admin-configured [briefing_defaults]:

[briefing_defaults.news]
lookback_hours = 12
sources = [
    { type = "domain", value = "semafor.com" },
    { type = "email", value = "briefing@nytimes.com" },
]

[briefing_defaults.headlines]
sources = ["ap", "reuters", "guardian", "ft", "aljazeera", "lemonde", "spiegel"]

Output format

Claude returns structured JSON ({"subject": "...", "body": "..."}). The scheduler parses it and handles delivery deterministically. The email skill is excluded from briefing tasks via exclude_skills to prevent the model from sending emails directly.

Scheduling

Cron expressions are evaluated in each user's timezone. The scheduler checks for due briefings every briefing_check_interval (60s) and tracks the last run per briefing in the briefing_state table.