August 22, 2026 · 6 min

A daily standup, written from your git commits

Standup is five minutes of trying to remember what you did yesterday. Your commits already know. This wires the two together: a cron job on your box reads your git history each weekday morning and writes the standup for you, so it’s waiting in Slack before the meeting starts.

It reuses the same GitHub connection as the weekly git digest. That one is a Sunday look-back across the week. This is a short daily one you can paste straight into the team channel.

1. Connect GitHub

Your box can’t see your laptop, so it reads your work through GitHub. In the Hermes dashboard, add the GitHub plugin and sign in once. Give it read access to the repos you want in the standup. If you’ve already done this for the weekly digest, you’re set, skip ahead.

2. Create the cron job

Click CRON in the sidebar, then CREATE. Name it Daily standup so you can find it later.

3. Write the prompt

The prompt is just what you’d type in chat. Something like:

Read my GitHub commits from the last 24 hours across
alderaan-api, alderaan-web and the infra repo. Write a
standup in three short parts:
- Yesterday: what I actually shipped, one line per repo
- Today: what those commits suggest I'm mid-way through
- Blocked: anything that looks stuck (a reverted commit,
  a branch with no merge, a TODO I keep pushing)
Keep it under 120 words. Skip repos with no commits.

Name the repos. Point it at “every repo in the org” and the standup turns into a wall of other people’s merges. Three or four repos is the sweet spot for a personal standup.

The “Blocked” line is worth keeping. A model reading raw commit history spots the branch you started Tuesday and never merged, which is usually the thing you forgot you were stuck on.

4. Schedule it and pick where it lands

In the schedule field, put 0 9 * * 1-5 for 9am on weekdays. If cron syntax is rusty, crontab.guru spells any expression out in English. The schedule runs in your box’s timezone, which is UTC on a fresh box until you change it, so set that first if 9am UTC isn’t your 9am.

Set delivery to your Slack or Telegram channel so the standup shows up where you’ll read it. Hit CREATE. The job lands in Scheduled Jobs with a green scheduled badge and the next run time.

5. Read it, then fix the prompt once

The first real run is a draft you edit. Every run opens as its own session in the dashboard, so open tomorrow’s, read what it wrote, and adjust the prompt where it missed. Common tweaks after day one:

• Too long? Add “one line per repo, no preamble.”
• Listing trivial commits? Add “group related commits; ignore formatting and dependency bumps.”
• Want ticket numbers? Add “pull any JIRA or issue reference out of the commit message and keep it.”

After a couple of mornings the prompt settles and you stop touching it. The standup writes itself off work you already did, which is the only honest source for one anyway.

Related

• A weekly git digest for solo projects — the Sunday version, with the accountability bit.
• A morning Hacker News brief on a cron — the same CRON tab, a different job.
• Turn your Hermes Agent into a Slack bot — so the standup lands in the channel you already watch.