Ops Digest

Every three hours, Foundry reads the MBOS event intake JSONL files, checks whether enough new operational activity has accumulated, asks the agent to summarise it, and drops a markdown digest at a stable path. This is the third proactive formation Foundry ships, alongside the nightly maintenance run and the daily commit digest.

The digest exists to answer one question reliably across the working day: what happened in my business and technical systems since the last check? It is intentionally lightweight — no deep triage, no automated response, just a clear roll-up grouped by domain with an anomaly section when something needs your attention.

How it fires

flowchart TD
    A([ops-digest @ 0 */3 * * *<br/>Sentinel]) -->|emit| B([ops_digest_started<br/>project=system])
    B --> C[[ObserveEvents<br/>Observer block]]
    C -->|reads intake JSONL<br/>applies pressure gate| D{gate<br/>satisfied?}
    D -->|no — skip| E([ops_digest_completed<br/>skipped=true])
    D -->|yes — proceed| F([ops_observed<br/>lean event digests])
    F --> G[[SummarizeEvents<br/>Agent-invoking block]]
    G -->|Claude renders<br/>domain-grouped digest| H([ops_summary_composed<br/>markdown body])
    H --> I[[WriteOpsDigest]]
    I -->|writes file + advances watermark| J([ops_digest_completed<br/>success, digest_path])

The chain is linear — no fan-out. OpsDigestStarted is a span opener, so every digest run gets its own trace_id.

Pressure gate

ObserveEvents applies a pressure gate before passing events downstream. The gate is satisfied when either condition holds:

• At least 25 new events have arrived since the last watermark.
• At least one event qualifies as an anomaly (see below).

When the gate is not satisfied ObserveEvents emits OpsDigestCompleted{skipped: true} directly and the chain terminates cleanly — no agent call, no file written.

Anomaly classification

An event is an anomaly if it matches any of these conditions:

Foundry also reads initiative attention from its campaign store API. An unanswered shared question older than one day is an anomaly. An open initiative with no member activity for thirty days is an anomaly. These anomalies open the pressure gate even with fewer than 25 intake events. The digest names the initiative and the question or inactive period. An overdue question also names its affected members. Older initiatives with no known creation or activity time are not classified as inactive. Answer questions in ops-visualizer's Sources page or with foundry initiative decide.

The summary agent receives the event facts in its prompt. It runs in an empty temporary directory. If the agent is unavailable, the digest retains a raw listing of those facts with the failure reason.

Where the digest lands

{FOUNDRY_OPS_DIGESTS_DIR}/YYYY-MM-DD.md

The default ops_digests_dir is ~/.foundry/ops-digests/. Set FOUNDRY_OPS_DIGESTS_DIR in the daemon's launchd plist to put it wherever you prefer. The typical Operations-side override pattern:

<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
<dict>
  <key>FOUNDRY_OPS_DIGESTS_DIR</key>
  <string>/Users/svetzal/Work/Operations/Automation/ops-digests</string>
</dict>

Running the digest multiple times in one day appends to the same dated file — last one wins (atomic rename).

Where the intake comes from

ObserveEvents reads MBOS JSONL files from:

{FOUNDRY_OPS_EVENTS_DIR}/YYYY-MM.jsonl

The default ops_events_intake_dir is ~/Work/Operations/Events/intake. Override with FOUNDRY_OPS_EVENTS_DIR.

Each line in the file is a MBOS event object with at minimum an id, type, occurredAt, urgency, and summary field. Malformed lines are silently skipped so a bad event never aborts the chain.

Watermark-based incremental ingestion

After each successful digest write, WriteOpsDigest atomically advances ~/.foundry/ops-digest.watermark to the occurredAt timestamp of the newest event included in that digest. On the next run ObserveEvents reads the watermark and only considers events with occurredAt strictly after that timestamp — so you never re-process the same event in two digests.

On the very first run (no watermark file), the lookback window is 24 hours.

A dry-run firing (--throttle dry_run) runs the full chain — reads events, applies the gate, invokes the agent — but does not write the file or advance the watermark.

What's in the file

A typical digest looks roughly like this:

# Ops Digest — 2026-05-29

_47 operational events._

## ⚠ Anomalies

- `ci_pipeline_failure` on foundry — PR #42 gate failure, suspected flake.

## Infrastructure

- [P1] `maintenance_run_completed` | 3 repos processed, 1 failed (hone-cli)
- [P2] `dependency_vulnerability_detected` | moderate CVE in libc

## AI

- [P2] `ai_session_start` | 12 agent sessions this period
- [P2] `hone_iteration_started` | 8 iterations across 5 projects

## Clients

- [P1] `email_inbound_support` | Acme Corp — billing question
- [P2] `whatsapp_inbound_support_message` | Quick status check from BetaCo

## Summary

One CI failure on foundry that looks like a test flake — worth a quick check.
Maintenance ran cleanly on all other projects. Moderate client activity,
nothing urgent beyond the billing query.

Triggering it manually

foundry emit ops_digest_started --project system
foundry watch         # observe the chain
cat ~/.foundry/ops-digests/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md

To pause the three-hourly run:

foundry sentinel disable ops-digest

And to re-enable:

foundry sentinel enable ops-digest

Event taxonomy

Environment variables

Work reconciliation

The work-reconciler sentinel runs at 30 */3 * * *, or use foundry queue reconcile against the daemon to run it now and print that invocation’s report. It reports exact inventory identities and conservatively settles verified preserved obligations without deleting their evidence. Orphan, broken and unresolved findings, including inspection errors, reach the ops anomaly path even below the normal pressure threshold. See the work reconciler guide for proof and failure semantics.