Linear Cycle Progress Digest

You can tell a cycle went badly on its last day, which is the one day nothing can be done about it. Every morning this agent reads the running cycle against the two before it and posts the numbers that show whether the team is roughly where it usually is by now, together with the work that has gone quiet and the issues that landed after the cycle opened. It is a health read rather than a task list, and it names the issues so the conversation has somewhere to begin.

What people use it for

• See the slip on day four - Holding today next to the same day of the last cycle turns a vague feeling that things are dragging into a number, with a week and a half still left to do something about it.
• Find the work that went quiet - Anything in progress past your threshold is listed with its age and its owner. Long lived in progress issues are where cycles leak, and they hide on a board because they look exactly like work happening.
• Make late arrivals countable - Nine issues landing on a Thursday after a customer escalation is worth having in writing when the cycle closes short. The agent lists them and adds no editorial of its own.
• Works on teams that never point - Plenty of Linear teams leave every estimate empty. The digest counts issues and labels the figures as counts, rather than presenting a number that quietly mixes estimated work with unestimated work.

Before you fork

We do not use estimates. Is this any use to us?

Yes, and it expects that. With estimates empty it counts issues and says on the line that these are counts, so nothing silently blends pointed work with unpointed work. Teams that do estimate get the same headings computed from their own estimate field instead.

How is this different from Linear's own cycle graph?

The graph shows the shape once you open it and remember to. This arrives in the channel your team already lives in, names the specific issues that produced the shape, and holds the previous cycle up beside the current one so a slow opening week is legible on day four. Run both, they answer different questions.

What can it change in Linear, and what do the runs add up to?

Nothing at all. Its Linear access is read only: no edits, no comments, no cycle changes, so a mistake shows up as an odd line in Slack and never as a moved issue. One run each morning per team you point it at, whether the cycle holds twenty issues or two hundred, so what you pay tracks the number of mornings and nothing besides.