Solution · Project 3 — The Morning Brief with a Memory

Reference solution. Read the project first.

Worked example

Four services tracked: payments-api, billing-worker, web-frontend, notifications.

brief-state.md, day 2 (excerpt):

| Repo | Last SHA seen | Reported PR IDs | First-noticed (untouched) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| payments-api | a91f3c2 | #412 | #398 → 2026-07-19T08:00Z |
| billing-worker | 7be201d | — | — |
| web-frontend | c04e91a | #77, #78 | — |
| notifications | 5a1d9ef | — | #61 → 2026-07-20T08:00Z |

Day 1 triage-report.md:

1. payments-api CI red on main since a91f3c2 — a migration failed on staging apply. Fix before anything else merges.
2. web-frontend #77 waiting on your review 26h — small CSS-only diff, low risk.
3. notifications #61 open 50h untouched — original author unresponsive; consider reassigning.

Day 2 triage-report.md (the point of this project — nothing repeats unless its urgency changed):

1. web-frontend #78 opened overnight — depends on #77, still unreviewed.
2. notifications #61 now 74h untouched — escalating urgency, unchanged status otherwise.

Item 1 from day 1 (payments-api CI) is absent because it was fixed and merged — verified against the new last SHA seen, not assumed. Item 2 from day 1 (#77) is absent because it's still just "waiting," not new information — only #78, which depends on it, is worth a fresh line.

Why this satisfies "done when"

• brief-state.md grows a "first-noticed" mark the moment an item is first seen, and that mark — not "today's date" — is what makes "74h untouched" on day 2 arithmetically honest.
• Day 2's report is strictly additive: no line repeats verbatim, and the one carryover item (#61) is included because its urgency crossed a threshold, not by default.

Common wrong turns

• Re-deriving "how long has this been open" from the PR's creation date instead of a spine-recorded first-noticed mark — breaks the moment the loop's own definition of "noticed" needs to differ from GitHub's raw metadata (e.g., you only start caring after a review request, not on open).
• Letting the report grow past 5 lines "just this once" — the cap is what keeps a brief a brief instead of a re-triage.