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.

Catching up on demand

Run /ff catchup in an active incident channel. Firefight confirms it is generating, then posts a catch-up focused on the conversational narrative 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

Status changes, severity changes, and lead assignments are deliberately left out of the prose. They already live in the structured timeline, so the catch-up spends its space on the parts of the story only the conversation holds.

How the live summary stays current

Behind every catch-up sits a live summary of the channel narrative that Firefight keeps up to date incrementally.

The first time a summary is needed, Firefight builds it from the full channel history. After that, each refresh feeds the model only the prior summary plus what changed, the new top-level messages and any threads that received new replies, with an updated thread shown in full so replies keep their context. The summary is stored with a marker of the last message it covers.

A refresh happens when a feature needs the summary, such as a catch-up request, a responder question, or postmortem generation. If the summary already covers the latest message it is reused as is, and a summary generated within the last fifteen minutes is reused even when a few newer messages exist. If a refresh fails, for example because the model provider is briefly unavailable, Firefight falls back to the most recent good summary rather than blocking the feature that asked.

Note

The live summary also feeds postmortem generation, so an incident that used catch-ups along the way gets a faster, better-grounded postmortem draft at the end.

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.