Your attention feed
As Erdo runs more work on your behalf — building pages, running experiments, watching your data — the question stops being “what are the agents doing?” and becomes “what actually needs me?”. Nine times out of ten the answer is nothing, and the interface’s job is to make that legible without you reading a log. So everything that wants your attention queues into one place — the Activity feed — rather than reaching you from several directions at once. There is no separate approvals inbox here, no decisions panel there, no “pick A or B” somewhere else: one stream, ranked by how much a decision hangs on it, with a single budget on how often it is allowed to interrupt. Items come in three shapes, because they do three genuinely different jobs.Digests — the narrative channel
A digest is editorial and asks nothing of you. “Built ten landing pages across five personas; two look unusually strong; nothing needs you.” It exists so you can get an innate feel for whether the work is healthy — the daily-standup read, not an event log — and it projects rather than merely reports: what the work is doing, why, and what it will do next. Digests are marked read as soon as they’ve been on screen, so the feed reflects what you’ve actually seen.Choices — buying your judgment
A choice is Erdo asking for your judgment, not your permission. Where a human comparison is worth more than a machine’s — early rounds, new territory, taste-heavy calls — the feed asks for it in the cheapest possible form: pick your top five of these ten, A-or-B five times, rank these three ideas. You answer in seconds by tapping options. Two things make a choice more than a convenient survey. First, every answer is recorded as a labelled comparison — you are the most expensive and most trusted judge Erdo has, so your verdict both steers the live decision and scores the cheaper automatic judges against it, sharpening them over time. When a choice is tied to a running experiment, picking an option marks that option’s variant as beating the ones you didn’t pick, and those comparisons flow into the experiment’s calibration record. Second, choices are rationed by the same interrupt budget as everything else, so Erdo has to spend its questions where your judgment actually moves the outcome — it can’t nag.Seeing the work, not a description of it
A choice between landing pages is only as good as what you can see when you decide, so the feed carries the work itself rather than a summary of it. When a choice’s options map to pages Erdo has built, each option renders as a live preview — the real page running its real code, motion and interactivity included, not a stale screenshot — laid out side by side as a comparison grid on desktop and a swipeable carousel on your phone. You pick by looking, and tapping a preview opens the full page in a new tab. Because the preview is the actual page, comparing rendered work also produces sharper labels for the automatic judges than comparing descriptions ever could. The previews reference the same pages that Erdo publishes and experiments with — the feed adds no new way to run code and no new place for it to reach. A page shown here is rendered exactly as it is, without the traffic-splitting that a live visitor would see, so the card always shows the specific variant you’re weighing. For a candidate that isn’t a published page yet, Erdo can attach a small self-contained snippet, rendered in the same locked-down sandbox everything else on Erdo runs in. Previews load only as they scroll into view, so a long feed of live pages stays light. Digests can carry evidence the same way: when a number tells the story — leads by variant this week, cost per booked meeting — the digest attaches a chart or table drawn with the same components you see elsewhere in Erdo, rather than spelling the figures out in prose. It’s shown only when seeing the shape changes what you’d conclude, so the narrative channel stays a narrative and doesn’t turn into a dashboard.Escalations — a blocked question, already half-answered
An escalation is a question the work is blocked on — but never a bare question. It arrives with Erdo’s proposed answer, a safe default, and an expiry. The workstream keeps doing what it still can while it waits; you either accept the proposal in one click or give a different answer. And if you don’t respond by the expiry, the safe default is applied automatically and the work continues — a stalled decision never silently halts a workstream. This is guidance, not a hand-off: Erdo has done the thinking and needs only your confirmation or correction.Judge re-screens — a standard moved under live work
When a judge is updated — its rubric edited, or the shared principles it reviews against revised — every future page automatically gets built to the new standard. But pages already serving live traffic in a running experiment were screened under the old one, and a judge re-screen item is how the gap surfaces: Erdo re-runs the changed judge over the live variants, and if a judge with a trusted track record now finds blocking issues, one item per affected experiment appears in the feed naming the variants and the top findings. Nothing is changed automatically — the variants keep serving, because a moving standard is not a mandate to churn live pages. The item proposes the response instead: an iterate bet on that experiment, so any fix goes through the same build-and-screen path as every other change. Judges still earning their calibration don’t raise these items at all; their re-screen verdicts land quietly in the calibration ledger.Severity and the interrupt budget
Every item carries a severity, and severity governs one thing: whether it may interrupt you.- FYI and Needs attention wait quietly in the feed until you look.
- Urgent is the only level allowed to break through — and the number of open urgent items is capped per organization. When the budget is full, a new urgent item is automatically downgraded to Needs attention rather than piling onto an alarm you’re already ignoring.
Held items — deferral you can see
Severity does more than decide whether something interrupts you; it decides when it reaches the top of the feed. Only urgent items land in Needs you the moment they’re raised. A Needs attention or FYI choice or escalation is still something you can act on, but it isn’t worth breaking your attention for right now — so instead of surfacing immediately it is held, and the feed shows a single collapsed row beneath the urgent band: “3 items waiting.” The same control-room lineage that caps urgency is behind this — a mistimed non-critical alert costs more in lost focus than the delay costs in latency, so the disciplined move is to queue it to a natural breakpoint and let you choose when to look. The count is the point. Deferral must never read as silence, so the number of waiting items is always visible even while their detail is folded away. Two things surface a held item in full: you expand the row whenever you want to act, or a digest arrives for its workstream — held items ride along with the next narrative update for the work they belong to, so they reach you at the moment you’re already reading about that workstream rather than as a standalone interruption. Approvals are never held: an approval is a block you deliberately put yourself in front of, so it always surfaces at once.When one failure floods the feed
A single root cause can trip many workstreams at once — one broken integration, one bad deploy, one upstream outage — and naively the feed would light up with a dozen urgent items that are really one problem wearing many hats. Control-room history has a name for this failure: the alarm avalanche, where a hundred annunciators fire in seconds and the one fault behind them becomes harder to see, not easier. So when the number of open urgent items in a short window crosses a threshold, the feed switches to overview-first. The individual alarms collapse behind clusters — one row per workstream and kind, “5 escalations · Lead engine” — under a synthesized headline that names the shape of the storm: “12 urgent items across 4 workstreams — likely common cause.” You see the pattern before any single item, expand a cluster only when you want the detail, and the quiet board above the feed is already showing you which workstreams are involved. The clustering is plain grouping, computed the same way every time — there is no guesswork on the read path, so the same storm always renders the same way.What surfaces first — ranked by decision, not by clock
A feed sorted newest-first buries the one escalation that needs an answer under a wall of completed runs, so the Activity feed is ordered by decision-value instead. Anything you can act on right now — an open choice, an escalation waiting on you, a pending approval — rises to the top under a Needs you heading, ahead of everything that is merely news. Within that band the order follows urgency: a higher-severity item outranks a lower one, and among items of equal severity the one whose safe default fires soonest comes first — an escalation auto-resolving in two hours sits above one that has until tomorrow, because the sooner it resolves itself the sooner the choice leaves your hands. Below Needs you come the digests you haven’t read yet, and below those the rest of the timeline in the usual reverse-chronological order. Nothing is hidden; the ranking only decides what you see first. (The interrupt budget already caps how much can pile up, so ordering never has to compensate for volume.)The quiet board — state at a glance
The feed reports change; a small always-on board above it reports state. It carries one cell per active workstream, and it follows the control-room principle that darkness means normal: when every workstream is healthy and inside its budget, the board collapses to a single muted “all quiet” line with nothing to read, so “is everything OK?” is answerable at a glance without parsing anything. Only the exceptions light up — a workstream that is over its spend envelope, or one carrying an open urgent item — and only those show detail. Each cell links straight to its workstream, so going from “something needs me” to the place you can act on it is one click.Following — scoping the feed to what you own
The feed works because every item is about your money, your leads, your workstreams — ownership already did the filtering that engagement-ranking never solved for social media. Following narrows that one more turn: when you follow a workstream, its digests, choices, and narrative events populate your feed’s default view, and the workstreams you don’t follow fade into the background. You follow a workstream from its detail page or from its cell on the quiet board, and Erdo follows for you the ones you clearly care about — the workstream you just created, and any you drop a steering note into. An All toggle switches back to the whole organization whenever you want the wider view; if you follow nothing, you see everything, so the scoping only ever narrows a feed you’d otherwise have to narrow by hand. One channel is never scoped away: urgent items always break through, whether or not you follow the workstream that raised them, and org-level alerts that belong to no single workstream always show. Following quiets the ambient, narrative surface — never the alarm. A crisis on a workstream you weren’t watching still reaches you.Steering notes — reaching in mid-run
The feed is mostly Erdo talking to you; steering notes are you talking back without stopping anything. On a Workstream’s page you can drop a note the moment an idea occurs — a hunch, a constraint, a correction (“the client hates countdown timers”). The note lands in the workstream’s event log, and the agents pick it up on their next pass and treat it as new evidence: updating what they’re building, dropping ideas the note rules out, spawning ones it suggests. Because Erdo’s loops always reconcile against a consistent, written state rather than firing one-shot event chains, steering needs no special ceremony — a note from you is just evidence that happened to arrive from a human instead of from the data. Steering costs you seconds; carrying it out costs you nothing.Ask about any item — introspection in one click
Every item in the feed carries an Ask button. Press it and Erdo opens the owning Workstream’s thread — where that workstream’s full context is already loaded — with a reference to the item pre-filled in the message box (“About attention item …”). You finish the sentence and send. Nothing is sent on your behalf; the prefill is a starting point, not an action. This is deliberate: the deep-explainability layer is chat, which you already have, so “why did the critic block this?” or “what would change your mind about page B?” is one click away rather than a database query. An item with no workstream opens a fresh thread instead. Feed items also carry actor chips — the workstream that produced the item, and, where a choice is tied to one, the experiment it scores — so you can click straight through to the thing itself. The surface stays simple no matter how involved the engine underneath gets; easy introspection is what keeps that simplicity honest rather than opaque.Programmatic access
The feed is also readable and answerable over MCP, the REST API, and the CLI — the same items you see in Activity, org-scoped and RBAC’d. This is how a headless caller reviews what needs a human and responds without opening the app. Responding takes one of three actions. Answer a choice or escalation with your pick; when the choice is tied to a running experiment, your answer is recorded as a comparison attributed tohuman:<you> — the option you chose beats the ones you didn’t, and those comparisons
score the cheaper judges against you. Acknowledge marks an item read without deciding
it, and dismiss clears it from the feed.
MCP tools
REST
Base URLhttps://api.erdo.ai. Authorization: Bearer <token> + X-Organization-ID.
GET /v1/attention takes optional statuses, engine_actions_only, limit, and offset query
parameters. POST /v1/attention/:id/respond takes action (answer, acknowledge, or dismiss)
and, for answer, the answer body.
The whole feed over the API
GET /v1/attention returns attention items alone. But Activity is more than attention items —
it can merge attention items, approvals, workstream narrative events, catalog updates,
and automation history into one ranked stream. The default is deliberately narrower: the things a
person may need to understand or decide, not a log of every successful background operation.
GET /v1/activity/feed exposes it, so a headless caller reads the same feed a person sees in the app
— already ranked, already clustered — instead of fetching each source separately and rebuilding the
ordering itself.
The default view matches the app’s: attention items, approvals, and workstream events. Individual
job executions, heartbeat executions, and catalog batches are operational history, so they do not
crowd the attention feed unless you ask for them. Repeated automation failures still surface as one
deduplicated escalation after Erdo’s repair attempts; hiding raw executions does not hide sustained
breakage. In the app, shared threads, upcoming schedules, and automation suggestions are also hidden
by default; select Shared threads, Jobs, or Heartbeats in the type filter to see them. Pass
categories — a comma-separated subset of attention, approval, workstream, catalog, job,
heartbeat — to change the mix; naming catalog, job, or heartbeat opts that history back in.
The attention and workstream sources appear only when the engine is enabled for your organization.
The response carries the same ordering described above under What surfaces first:
items you can act on right now lead, sorted by severity and then by which safe default fires soonest,
followed by the digests you haven’t read, then the rest of the timeline newest-first. Each item
carries needs_action so you can render a “Needs you” band without re-deriving it, and its
severity, and — for attention items — a slug you respond to. When a storm trips
overview-first mode, the individual urgent items are marked
clustered and the response’s urgent_clusters carry the grouped rows — one root cause behind N
alarms — each with a summary, a count, and the member item_ids, alongside a one-line
flood_summary.
The feed endpoint is read-only. To act on an item you respond exactly as you would to an
attention item or an approval on its own: POST /v1/attention/:id/respond to answer, acknowledge, or
dismiss a choice or escalation, and POST /v1/approvals/:id/decide to approve or reject an approval.
scope accepts following or all (default all); because an API token is org-scoped and carries
no per-user follow set, following behaves as all for a token and is meaningful only for a
user-scoped credential.
For one Strategy or workstream, pass workstream_slug. This is an exact operating
view: it includes only that workstream’s attention, approvals, and narrative events. Urgent and
standalone items from elsewhere do not break through, and unscopable catalog/job history is omitted.
GET /v1/activity/feed takes optional limit (default 20, max 100), offset, categories,
scope, and exact workstream_slug query parameters. Its MCP mirror is
erdo_list_activity_feed.