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The Latest Brief panel is the dashboard surface for the WorldMonitor Brief — an AI-generated daily intelligence digest that synthesises the day’s most significant events into a structured, source-attributed read. The composer runs as a Railway job once per day per user; the panel simply mirrors whatever brief exists for the signed-in reader at the moment they open the dashboard.

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What the panel shows

Three states are rendered, depending on the reader and the composer’s progress:
  • Ready — a cover-card thumbnail, the brief’s greeting, the day’s thread count, and a Read brief → button that opens the signed magazine URL in a new tab.
  • Composing — a soft empty state when the composer has not yet produced today’s brief. The panel auto-refreshes on the next user-visible interaction; no manual retry is needed.
  • Locked — a premium-upgrade overlay drawn by the base panel framework when the reader does not meet the PRO gate.
Panel id is latest-brief; canonical component is src/components/LatestBriefPanel.ts.

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How you reach it

  • Cmd+K — type brief (matches “Panel: Latest Brief” in the command palette).
  • Availability by variant: registered and enabled by default in the full/geopolitical, tech, finance, and commodity variants (all of them as premium: 'locked'). Not present in the happy variant. Source: FULL_PANELS, TECH_PANELS, FINANCE_PANELS, COMMODITY_PANELS in src/config/panels.ts.
Clicking Read brief → opens the full magazine-style reader in a new tab. Sharing the brief is a separate, explicit action — see AI Brief Endpoints for how share links are materialised.

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Data sources

The panel calls GET /api/latest-brief (Clerk JWT required, PRO gated). The response is either the ready payload (issueDate, dateLong, greeting, threadCount, magazineUrl) or a { status: "composing", issueDate } stub. The signed magazineUrl is generated server-side — the HMAC signing secret never lives in the client bundle. The brief itself is composed by a Railway job from:
  • Curated news aggregates and GDELT signals
  • The intelligence, conflict, and markets caches
  • Per-reader personalisation if the user has configured preferences
Redis key shape (for anyone inspecting the feature from the backend):
  • The composer writes the envelope to brief:{userId}:{issueSlot} — where issueSlot is computed by issueSlotInTz(nowMs, userTz), so two same-day compose runs in different time-of-day slots produce distinct keys.
  • A latest pointer is written atomically alongside: brief:latest:{userId} → { "issueSlot": "<slot>" }. Readers (the dashboard panel, the share-URL endpoint) resolve the current brief by reading the pointer first, then fetching the slot-keyed envelope.
  • TTL is 7 days on both keys; if the pointer is absent, the reader treats the user as having no recent brief.
Reference: scripts/seed-digest-notifications.mjs (writer) and api/latest-brief.ts (reader).

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Refresh cadence

  • Composer: one run per eligible user per day (Railway cron).
  • Panel — ready state: reads on panel load; subsequent reads happen only on user-visible refresh triggers. No polling timer while the brief is already displayed.
  • Panel — composing state: schedules a 60-second re-poll (COMPOSING_POLL_MS = 60_000 in src/components/LatestBriefPanel.ts) so the panel transitions from composing to ready on the next composer tick without requiring a full page reload. The poll timer is cleared when the panel leaves the composing state.
The brief is explicitly a daily product — if the composer has not produced today’s brief yet, the panel shows composing rather than yesterday’s content, and auto-promotes to ready once the composer writes today’s payload.

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Tier & gating

Latest Brief is PRO. The panel is registered with premium: 'locked' in src/config/panels.ts, so free-tier readers see the upgrade overlay and never see the brief body. Verification runs server-side in api/latest-brief.ts — a valid Clerk JWT and an active PRO entitlement are both required; otherwise the endpoint returns 403 pro_required. No content is exposed over the wire for non-PRO readers.

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API reference

  • AI Brief Endpoints — covers /api/latest-brief, /api/brief/share-url, the public /api/brief/public/{hash} read, the per-user per-date read, and the social-ready PNG carousel route.