Field notes. John Arndt, Soxoa. Published .
Once a team starts handing real work to AI agents, a new problem shows up at 6pm: nobody can say what got done today. Five sessions ran. Something got deployed. Somebody asked an agent to "fix the billing email" and it may or may not have happened. The work is spread across terminals, chat windows and repositories, and none of them summarize themselves.
A human chief of staff would fix this with a short note at the end of the day. chief-of-staff-brief writes that note, from evidence.
Two sources, and only two
The brief reads two things:
What changed in the code
the commits since midnight in each repository, with messages, files and a capped slice of each diff, plus anything changed but not yet committed.
What people asked for
the requests typed into AI sessions that day, but not the tool output, which is long and mostly noise. The asks show intent. The commits show what actually happened. The gap between them is the interesting part.
Everything in the brief has to trace back to one of the two. If it can't be cited, it's left out.
Five fixed sections
- TL;DR
- three sentences. The biggest thing that shipped, the biggest thing that's stuck, the one decision waiting on you.
- What got worked on
- per product, in plain words.
- Key takeaways
- what the day implies, like a pattern of failures, a risk or a cost.
- Content angles
- four to six true things from today that could become a post. For a founder who sells on expertise, this section often pays for the whole brief.
- Open threads
- started and not finished, promised in a session, or waiting on someone.
Shipped, changed, discussed
The brief keeps three words strictly apart. Shipped means merged or deployed and verified. Changed means committed. Discussed means someone talked about it in a session. An agent saying "I've fixed it" is discussed. A commit is changed. A passing check on the live site is shipped. Mixing these up is how owners end up believing things are done that aren't.
Two operating rules
Secrets. Session transcripts collect pasted keys and passwords. The brief never quotes a line that looks like one, and it adds an open thread telling you to rotate it.
Failures. If a source can't be read, the brief says so at the top. A scheduled report that silently emails an error message as "today's brief" teaches everyone to stop reading it.
Keep the daily narrative and save the numbers for a weekly review, so the two never repeat each other.
Get the skill
chief-of-staff-brief is part of the free Soxoa Ops plugin for Claude. In Claude Code, add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add johnarndt/soxoa-claude-plugins, then run /plugin install soxoa-ops@soxoa-plugins. You can read the skill on GitHub before installing it, or copy its folder into ~/.claude/skills/.