Meet Activity: Not Every Update Deserves a Report

My agent has been able to reach out to me for a long time. I'd set up a task to watch a deploy, or a price, or a thread I was waiting on, and when something happened, I'd hear about it.

The problem was how I heard about it. Every update arrived as a report. A proper, saved, multi-section document, even when the actual news was four words long.

"The build passed" doesn't need a title, a summary, and a next-steps section. But that's what I got. So after a while, I stopped setting up the small watches. They weren't worth the clutter.

What changed

Now my agent gets to choose how much to say.

When the news is small (a heads-up, a quick fact, a status change), it sends a short message. The kind of thing you'd get from a person: "That email you were waiting on just landed." When the news is substantial (research, an analysis, a digest worth keeping), it still writes a proper report and files it where reports belong. And when nothing has actually happened, it stays quiet. No report just to tell you there's nothing to report.

Same agent, same watches. It just picks the right weight now.

Here's what watching a deploy used to look like when it finally went green:

All of that to tell me one thing. Here's the same update now:

Your deploy's green. Build #1487, about four minutes, nothing for you to do.

One line. I read it and move on. And if I do want to do something (say, "roll it back" or "what changed in this one?"), I just reply, and my agent picks up right where the message left off.

Meet Activity

These quick messages needed a home that wasn't your Reports library, so there's a new one: Activity.

You'll find it in your chat: a small button that lights up when your agent is busy ("2 working") or has something ready for you ("3 new"). Open it and it reads like a chat, with the most recent at the bottom, right where you'd reply. And you can. Reply to anything and it opens back into a full conversation.

Reports haven't changed. They're still there for the things worth keeping and coming back to. Activity is for the rest: the quick updates that don't need to be filed, just seen.

It reaches you wherever you are

A message isn't much use if you only see it the next time you open the app. So it goes out wherever you already are, on whichever channel you've set up, whether that's a push notification, an email, or Telegram.

Telegram is where it really clicked for me. Reports came through here before too, but they arrived the way reports do: a heading, a summary, and a link to go open the full thing somewhere else. A quick message has no link and nothing to open. It just lands in the thread, in your agent's voice, the same as when you ask it something and it answers back. It stops feeling like an app sending you alerts and starts feeling like texting someone who's keeping an eye on things for you.

A few things mine has told me lately

• It caught that my 8:00 school-run block overlapped with a car wash I'd booked for 8:15, before the morning got away from me.
• It relayed an alert from my home server that one of its services had quietly crashed overnight.
• It noticed one of my cloud workspaces had hit its GPU limit and was starting to throttle jobs, before anything actually broke.
• It gave me under an hour's warning on an investment deadline that closed at 11 that night.

None of those are reports. None of them needed to be. They're the kind of thing a good assistant just mentions in passing.

It's live now

This is on for everyone, today. If you already have tasks running, you'll start noticing the difference: more small updates, fewer documents you didn't ask for.

Your agent has been able to reach out for a while. Now it can do it the way a person would: a quick word when there's something worth saying, and nothing when there isn't.