# Daily Standup > Build a standup report for the previous working day from what actually happened — PRs authored, updated and reviewed, tracker tickets that changed state, and the coding-session nuance none of those record. Detects a gap in your own activity and switches to catch-up mode, reporting what moved while you were away instead of an empty day. Use when asked for a standup, yesterday's summary, standup notes, "what did I do yesterday", or a catch-up after time off. Do NOT use for sprint reports, retrospectives, or anyone else's activity. - Skill: `awill1988/daily-standup` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 4 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add awill1988/daily-standup` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/awill1988/daily-standup/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Docs & Writing - License: MIT - Author: awill1988 (https://skillmd.com/u/awill1988) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/awill1988/daily-standup --- # Daily standup Reconstruct a working day from its evidence and write the message you post to your team. **The report describes the day as it stood at that day's end** — not as the API describes it now. A PR opened as a draft on Tuesday and merged on Wednesday was a draft all through Tuesday, and a Tuesday standup that calls it "merged" is wrong in the way nobody catches. Identity is derived, never configured: `gh api user` for the GitHub login, and your tracker's MCP for the tracker identity. `--org` is required — an unscoped search reaches every org the account can see. ## Step 1 — pick the window The target day defaults to **the previous working day**, overridable with a `YYYY-MM-DD` argument. Bind every fact to that day with a hard floor and ceiling **in the machine's own zone**, computed once, up front. Never name or hardcode a zone: ```bash DATE="$TARGET" # YYYY-MM-DD FLOOR_UTC=$(TZ=UTC date -r "$(date -j -f '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' "$DATE 00:00:00" +%s)" +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ) CEIL_UTC=$(TZ=UTC date -r "$(date -j -f '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' "$DATE 23:59:59" +%s)" +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ) ``` Echo `date +%Z` alongside the bounds so the zone is visible. A hardcoded abbreviation in the format string does not merely mis-offset — BSD `date` rejects it and both bounds come back empty, silently widening every query to "all time". ## Step 2 — check for a gap before assuming there is a day to report **Find the last moment you did anything**, across every source: your newest commit, PR event, review, tracker transition or comment, and doc edit. Call it `last_activity`. ``` now - last_activity > --gap (default 24h) → catch-up mode ``` This subsumes the special case of "it is Monday". A weekend is one instance of a gap; so is a week of leave, a conference, or an illness. Keying on the calendar means asking whether today is Monday when the real question is whether anything happened. Keying on the data answers both, and does not need a new rule the next time the shape of the absence changes. `--catch-up` forces it on, `--no-catch-up` forces it off, `--gap` moves the threshold. ### What catch-up mode changes A standup after time away is not a report of an empty day. It is a statement that **you have already absorbed what you missed** — the reading happened before the meeting, and what your team needs is where you are landing, not an apology. So the report inverts: 1. **One line naming the gap**, factually, without apology. "Back after three days" is the whole of it. 2. **What moved while you were away** — the section that carries the weight: - merges into branches you own or had open work on - review requests aimed at you, and reviews others left on your PRs - tickets assigned or reassigned to you, and status changes on tickets you own - incidents, rollbacks, or reverts touching your areas - decisions recorded in docs or tickets that change work you had planned 3. **What you are picking up today**, written as already-accounted-for. The implication of catching up is that it is done — so name the work, not the catching up. **Never write "I need to catch up" or "still getting up to speed."** That undersells reading you have already done and invites someone to re-explain it. State the conclusion you reached, not the process of reaching it. Where a normal standup omits other people's work, catch-up mode reports it — because during the gap their work *is* the change in your context. Attribute it plainly and never claim it. ## Step 3 — gather, then gate Pull candidates from every source, then apply the activity gate: a resource earns a place **only if you took a genuine in-window action on it**, never because its `updatedAt` moved. See [`references/activity-gate.md`](references/activity-gate.md) — this is where most of the wrongness lives, and it is worth reading before trusting a result. Reconstruct each item's state **as of the ceiling** using the governing timestamp for that transition, not the record's `updatedAt`. Table of governing timestamps per source and state: [`references/temporal-scope.md`](references/temporal-scope.md). Sources, in order of signal: 1. **PRs authored** — opened in-window. 2. **PRs updated** — pre-existing, but crossed a lifecycle milestone in-window. 3. **PRs reviewed** — a review you submitted in-window. 4. **Tracker tickets** — status transitions and comments you authored. 5. **Coding sessions** — the day's nuance, via `scripts/scan_sessions.py`. This is the only source permitted to open a work-stream with no PR or ticket behind it: an investigation, a remediation plan, a query that settled a question. ## Step 4 — write it **Group by work-stream, not by PR type.** One bold header per stream. The authored/updated/reviewed split drives gathering; it is not the visible structure. ``` *Yesterday — YYYY-MM-DD* ** - *Reviews — * - Approved|Changes requested (TICKET-#) *Plans today* - ``` Omit any stream with no activity. **Nuance attaches to the work, never to a section of its own.** Name the change, not the exchange: ``` - Pivoted to polling — the provider emits nothing on that event ✅ - Asked about the webhook surface and found it emits nothing ❌ narrates the session ``` A decision states what was chosen **and what it was chosen over**. One line, the fact that changed the work. **Never mention the assistant, a session, a prompt, or a transcript.** The report is your work; naming the tooling is both noise and a misattribution. ### Slack formatting The output is pasted into Slack, whose mrkdwn is not Markdown: - `*bold*` single asterisks, `_italic_`, `` `code` ``, `-` for bullets - **never** `[text](url)` and **never** `` — both arrive literally. A link is a title, a space, then the raw url - `—` between a title and its description, `→` for transitions - no `#` headers, no tables ## Step 5 — hand off Write the report to a file and open it. That is how the skill concludes. ```bash report="/tmp/standup-.txt" printf '%s\n' "$REPORT" > "$report" ${VISUAL:-${EDITOR:-open}} "$report" ``` Chat gets the path and any judgement call worth flipping — a dropped item, an ambiguous attribution, whether catch-up mode fired. Not the report body: it is edited and sent from the editor, and a wall of it in the console is noise. ## Troubleshooting **Both time bounds are empty** — a zone abbreviation was hardcoded in the `date -f` format string. Remove it; let `date` interpret local midnight. **An item you remember is missing** — it probably failed the activity gate. Check whether you crossed a milestone on it or only pushed commits; routine iteration is deliberately not reportable. **A merged PR is reported as open** — correct, if it merged after the ceiling. The report describes the day, not now. **No tracker MCP connected** — report PRs and sessions, and say the tracker was unavailable rather than implying there were no ticket changes. **Catch-up fired when you were working** — your activity was in a source the skill does not read (a different forge, a wiki it cannot reach). Use `--no-catch-up` and consider whether that source is worth adding. **`scan_sessions.py` returns nothing** — it reads local transcripts, so it only sees the machine it runs on. Sessions from another machine are invisible; say so rather than reporting a quiet day.