The morning brief

Most apps greet you the way an inbox does — badges, streaks blinking, a list of everything you have not done yet. For a student, that first glance sets the tone for the whole day, and the tone it usually sets is behind.

We built the morning brief to do the opposite. Open chud. before school and you get one calm view, readable in about thirty seconds: what today looks like, the few things worth knowing, and a single door into the most useful one. Then it gets out of the way.

The shape of the day

The brief starts with a date line and one sentence that hands you the day — the way a friend would. Under it, a thin line traces the day's arc: classes as dots, the free window marked in blue. A packed Tuesday looks like a climb. A quiet Saturday flattens to still water. The drawing never invents mountains, because the point is orientation, not drama.

What needs you, ranked by what it costs

An item earns a place on the brief only if ignoring it today costs something real. An exam on Friday means today's review slot genuinely matters — that is not motivation-speak, it is how spaced repetition works: the schedule places each card on the day reviewing it helps most. Cards due, feedback waiting on a draft, today's plan tasks — each gets a title in plain words, one sentence, and its real source.

Exactly one item gets a filled button. If the most useful thing you can do this morning is an eight-minute review, the brief says so and offers exactly that — not a menu of twelve equally-weighted options.

Every number is real

The card count comes from your actual review queue. The minutes estimate is computed from it. The quiz delta appears only when there is a real earlier attempt to compare against. If a signal has no source, it does not render — the brief would rather say less than guess.

And one rule we hold even when it would be easy not to: a broken streak is never mentioned. Your streak is a fact the brief will state when it is live — "your streak reaches 14 tonight if you review" — and simply silent about when it is not. Yesterday does not need a eulogy. Today's queue speaks for itself.

Quiet is an answer

Some mornings there is nothing to say. The brief says so: "Nothing needs you this morning." If your Bio deck is not due back until Thursday, that is the schedule working — not you slacking — and the brief tells you exactly that.

The morning brief lives on the Today screen, with the top three items in your sidebar all day. It re-checks itself whenever you come back, so a deck you cleared at lunch will not still be asking at three.

Open it tomorrow before first period. Thirty seconds, then go.