Activity Summary

Activity Summary — Read the Digest First

Overview

A relayfile workspace pre-computes deterministic daily activity digests at <mount>/digests/. These are produced by relayfile itself from the raw provider data, so they are complete over the time window (no API pagination gaps) and free for the agent to consume (one file read, no LLM generation step).

If you've been asked an activity-summary question, read the digest before doing anything else. Reaching for ls, grep, or per-provider exploration first is the most common reason these answers cost 20+ tool calls when they could cost 1.

When to use this skill

Trigger phrases from the user — read the digest first:

• "what did I work on yesterday / today / this week"
• "what changed across {GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack, ...} {yesterday, since Friday, etc.}"
• "summarize my activity"
• "give me a standup update"
• "what did $team_member ship recently"

If the user's question is not windowed by time (e.g. "find the Notion page about onboarding"), the digest is not the right entry point — use by-title/ or by-id/ indexes instead. See the workspace-layout skill.

What digests look like

$ ls $MOUNT/digests/
yesterday.md      # rolling — generated at 00:00 local for the prior calendar day
today.md          # rolling — updated continuously as the day progresses
2026-05-12.md     # date-stamped, immutable once the day closes
2026-05-11.md
...
this-week.md      # rolling — Mon→now of the current ISO week
last-week.md      # immutable, prior ISO week

The body is plain Markdown with one section per provider:

# Activity for 2026-05-12

## linear
- AGE-16 moved to Blocked (waiting on design) — [/linear/issues/AGE-16__87389837-...]
- AGE-9 closed — [/linear/issues/AGE-9__2bb2c00f-...]

## github
- relayfile-adapters#412 merged to main — [/github/repos/.../pulls/412.json]
- relayfile#287 opened — [/github/repos/.../pulls/287.json]

## notion
- "Khaliq's To Dos" edited — [/notion/pages/3566800c-.../content.md]

## slack
- 7 messages in #gtm-prospects mentioning "ACME"

Each bullet links to the canonical file in the mount, so a follow-up question ("what changed about AGE-16?") is one cat away.

How to use it

# 1. Check the digest covers the date the user asked about.
ls $MOUNT/digests/
cat $MOUNT/digests/yesterday.md

# 2. If the user asked about a specific date, prefer the date-stamped file.
cat $MOUNT/digests/2026-05-12.md

# 3. Confirm coverage before answering. The digest header includes the window
#    it spans; if the user's window is wider, read multiple digest files
#    rather than re-deriving from raw provider data.
head -5 $MOUNT/digests/this-week.md

That is usually the entire workflow: read → quote → done. Four tool calls or fewer.

When to fall back to exploration

The digest is the right answer when:

• The window matches a digest file (yesterday, today, a specific past date, this/last week).
• The user wants everything in the window, not a filtered slice.

Fall back to direct exploration via by-edited/<date>/ index subtrees when:

• The window is unusual (e.g. "the last 36 hours"). Use by-edited/ indexes; see workspace-layout.
• The user wants a filter the digest doesn't pre-compute (e.g. "only Linear issues assigned to me").
• The digest file is missing or its header indicates incomplete provider coverage.

Why this matters

In our published benchmarks, the activity-summary question dropped from ~20 turns and $0.30+ to 4 turns and ~$0.07 once the digest existed and the agent read it first. The digest is one file read that replaces ~25 individual provider queries.

If you find yourself listing more than 2-3 directories to answer an activity question, stop and check digests/ — you're almost certainly working harder than you need to.