Skip to content

Digest — what happened while you were away

Not everyone watches the board live. If you delegate work — to a teammate, to a coding agent, to yesterday-you — and come back to review at the end, you don't want a forward-looking to-do list. You want a retrospective: what got done, what was decided, what was found, and — first — what now needs you.

That is dna sdlc digest.

dna sdlc digest --since 24h            # everything that happened in the last day
dna sdlc digest --since last-digest    # since the last time you ran a digest
dna sdlc digest --since 3d --save      # persist it as a queryable StatusReport

Digest vs brief — backward vs forward

DNA already has forward-looking surfaces. The digest is their mirror image:

Direction Answers Audience
dna sdlc brief / next / current forward ⏩ "what should I do next?" whoever is about to start work
dna sdlc digest backward ⏪ "what already happened?" whoever delegated and reviews at the end

brief opens a session; digest closes the loop on one. Reach for digest when you were away — the work happened without you and you need to catch up in one screen.

The window — --since

The digest aggregates every work-item timeline event inside a window. --since accepts three forms (default: the last 24h):

  • an ISO-8601 timestamp — --since 2026-07-10T00:00:00Z;
  • a relative span — --since 90m / 24h / 3d / 2w;
  • last-digest — resolves to the generated_at of the most recent saved digest, so consecutive digests tile the timeline with no gaps or overlaps.

What it aggregates

The digest walks the timelines of every lifecycle Kind in the scope (Story, Feature, Epic, Issue, ADR, Kaizen, Spike, Bug, Task, Initiative) and groups what it finds:

  • ✅ Concluído — items that reached a terminal status in the window (Stories done, Issues resolved, Features shipped, …).
  • 🧠 Decidido — ADRs accepted plus decision timeline events (the why).
  • 🔍 Achado — Kaizens and Issues filed in the window.
  • 📈 Avançou — Features/Epics that moved without closing.
  • 🚀 Releases — git tags dated in the window.
  • 📎 Artefatos — everything produced (TestGuides, TestRuns, HTML, …).

Most buckets are filled from timeline events, but Achado and Decidido date a document by spec.created_at — the moment it was filed, which no event on its own timeline claims. A document written without that stamp is undatable, and therefore silently absent from those buckets in every window. That is a bug this board actually hit: Issues were being filed without created_at, so no digest ever listed one. Two things keep it from recurring — every write path is held to dna.application.sdlc.DATED_SPEC_FIELDS by a guard suite, and dna sdlc backfill-dates repairs the documents already on disk:

dna sdlc backfill-dates --dry-run   # what would be stamped, and from where
dna sdlc backfill-dates             # apply

It dates each document from its own timeline, falling back to the git commit that added the file. A document with neither is reported and left unstamped: writing today's date onto an old document would file it into the current window and hide it from the one it belongs to.

The part that matters most — "Precisa de você"

The digest leads with a needs-your-attention section, because that is the point of reviewing at the end. Unlike the rest of the digest, this section is not windowed — a Story that has been blocked for three days still needs you today. It surfaces:

  • 🚧 blocked items, with the recorded reason;
  • 👀 Stories in review — with their open PR numbers matched from gh;
  • 🧭 owner decisions — ADRs still proposed, awaiting ratification;
  • ❓ open questions — Spikes still unanswered.

The digest also carries a PMO-style RAG status: 🔴 red when something is blocked, 🟡 amber when there are pending reviews/decisions/questions, 🟢 green when nothing needs you.

🗞️  Digest — dna-development  (last 24h)
   39 concluído(s) · 5 decisão(ões) · 4 achado(s) · 8 release(s) — nada precisa da sua atenção.

🔔 PRECISA DE VOCÊ (0)
   (nada pendente — tudo tocou sozinho)

✅ Concluído (39)
   • s-tool-kind-descriptor   Tool Kind → record-plane descriptor   [→done]
   ...
🧠 Decidido (5)
   • adr-dna-pivot-portability   Pivot DNA into a vendor-neutral de-para layer
   ...

Persisting it — --save

With --save, the digest is written as a StatusReport named digest-<date> — a durable, queryable record rather than throwaway terminal output. The report's verdict and heuristic_explanation are embedded, so a later semantic search recalls it:

dna sdlc digest --since last-digest --save
dna cognitive search "digest dna-development"   # find past digests

A saved digest also anchors the next --since last-digest window — run one at the end of every delegated batch and the digests form a continuous, gapless log of "what happened, in order".