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The Latest Brief panel is the dashboard surface for the WorldMonitor Brief — an AI-generated intelligence digest that synthesises the most significant events in the reader’s configured digest window into a structured, source-attributed read. The default product cadence is daily, but digest rules can also produce twice-daily or weekly slots through digestMode. The panel simply mirrors the latest composed brief for the signed-in reader at the moment they open the dashboard. For the canonical pipeline details, see News Digest and Briefing Methodology.

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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 edition’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 the current slot. 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, including a followed-country lift that only reorders stories inside the same severity lane
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: the Railway digest cron composes for eligible users when their digestMode is due. Default is daily; twice-daily and weekly modes are supported by the same writer.
  • 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 panel follows the latest slot pointer rather than assuming a strictly calendar-daily edition. If the composer has not produced the current/requested slot yet, the panel shows composing and auto-promotes to ready once the composer writes the payload.

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Personalisation and editorial exclusions

Followed-country personalisation is a soft lift, not a filter and not a cross-severity promotion. The nominal FOLLOWED_BIAS_MULTIPLIER is 1.25 and is env-tunable, but the live composer applies it as a stable severity-lane sort: a followed-country story can move ahead of non-followed stories in the same lane, while lower-severity stories never jump above higher-severity stories. Free-tier readers can follow up to 3 countries. The brief excludes op-ed/opinion and analysis columns, feel-good/lifestyle items, and ephemeral live-coverage teasers such as “WATCH LIVE” pages. Those items can be acceptable in live news surfaces, but delayed briefs are meant to summarise durable event-driven intelligence.

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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-slot read, and the social-ready PNG carousel route.
  • News Digest and Briefing Methodology — source selection, deduplication, LLM grounding, and bias controls.