The morning digest from issue 1 answers "what happened today?" This week's agent answers a better question: "what changed this week, and what should I do about it?" Different job, different cadence, and the recipe where an agent starts acting like an analyst instead of a newsreader.
One idea: headlines are cheap, synthesis is the prize
A daily digest is a stream: new items, briefly, every morning. Useful, but it still leaves the hard part to you, because ten headlines are not a decision. The weekly brief is a different shape of work. It asks the agent to hold a whole week in view, throw away the noise that canceled itself out, and tell you what actually moved.
That gap, between "here is what was published" and "here is what changed and why it matters to you," is where most of your reading time disappears. It is also work an agent does surprisingly well, provided you do the one thing most people skip: tell it what mattering means. An agent that knows your goal can rank a week. An agent without one can only summarize it.
So this recipe has a secret ingredient, and it is a single phrase: "why it matters for [your goal]." Write that goal down before you write anything else.
One recipe: the Friday research brief
The job: every Friday afternoon, a sub-300-word brief on the week in a topic you care about, with receipts.
Step 1. Pick one topic and one goal. The topic is what to watch: your industry, your competitors, a market you invest in, a technology you are betting on. The goal is why you watch it, in one sentence. "I follow [topic] because [goal]." The brief is only as sharp as that sentence.
Step 2. Give your agent these instructions.
Every Friday at 4pm, review what happened this week in [topic], using [your sources, or a web search across reputable ones]. Send me a brief with three sections: what changed, why it matters for [your goal], and one thing worth doing about it next week. Keep it under 300 words. Include a link for every claim. If the week was quiet, say so in one line and stop.
The link-per-claim rule is your fact-check in the loop: a brief with receipts can be trusted fast and challenged fast. And the quiet-week line is the honesty rule from issue 1 again: when there is nothing worth saying, one line beats a padded page. Some Fridays the honest brief is one sentence, and that sentence still saves you the scroll.
Step 3. Set it up this weekend, grade it in a month. Success sentence: this agent is working if, four Fridays from now, I have stopped doomscrolling [topic] during the week because I know the brief has it covered. When a brief misses something you caught yourself, do not just sigh: add the source it should have read, and next Friday it reads it.
Step 4. Variations that earn their keep. A competitor brief before your Monday planning. A regulation watch for your niche. A "what did people say about us this week" brief pointed at reviews and mentions. Same skeleton, one agent each.
From the fleet
You now have four agents' worth of recipes: an industry digest, a meeting-prep brief, an inbox triage agent, and a research brief. A working week's worth of a chief of staff, and if you built even one, notice what they have in common: none of them runs on your laptop. Next week's issue is about exactly that, the five signs an agent has outgrown the machine it started on, and what to do about it.
Until then, the reply question: which brief would change your Monday most? One sentence.
Deploy your first agent free, paste the brief instructions with your topic and goal filled in, and schedule it for Friday at 4pm. First brief arrives before the weekend.
See you next Friday, David