Summaries & catch-up

Long incidents bury their own story. The decisions and dead ends that matter are spread across hours of channel messages and threads, and everyone who joins late pays the cost of scrolling. Firefight maintains a live summary of the narrative and serves it back on demand.

A catch-up answers one standing question in a fixed shape. To ask anything else about the incident, or to have something looked up in your connected tools, mention @Firefight in the channel and Halon answers in a thread.

Catching up on demand

Run /ff catchup in an active incident channel. Firefight tells you it is generating the catch-up, then posts it in the channel for everyone, focused on the conversation rather than a retelling of the timeline.

What has been investigated and which theories the team has tested
Key decisions made in chat, such as rollbacks considered or customer comms drafted
Blockers and open questions
What the team is currently focused on

Timeline events such as status changes, severity changes and lead assignments appear only as supporting evidence. You can already read them on the timeline, so the catch-up spends its space on the parts of the story only the conversation holds. It also draws on the incident’s details, its actions and follow-ups, and any runbooks attached to it.

Anywhere other than an active incident channel, including the channel of an incident that has ended, the command tells you to run it from an active one. When AI is not available to your workspace, or nothing can pay for it, the command or the channel says so instead of posting a catch-up.

How the live summary stays current

Behind every catch-up sits a live summary of the channel’s conversation, which Firefight brings up to date whenever something needs it, such as a catch-up, postmortem generation, the timeline notes Firefight adds when an incident ends, or what Halon learns from an incident.

A summary made in the last fifteen minutes is used again as it is, so a catch-up can leave out the newest few messages. If the model provider is briefly unavailable, you get the most recent summary instead of an error.

What summaries are built from

Summaries are built from the incident channel’s transcript as Firefight stores it.

Messages posted by people in the incident channel, including thread replies, in chronological order and attributed by name
Not messages posted by bots or apps, which are excluded so alert noise and automation chatter do not pollute the narrative

Edited messages are updated in the transcript, and deleted messages are excluded from all summaries generated afterward. Known secret formats are redacted from messages before they are stored, so they never reach a summary. See AI data handling for exactly what is stored and scrubbed.