Previous system prompt asked for "warm, conversational, like a friend
writing a letter" which produced flowery preludes that buried the actual
data. Rewritten to:
- Lead with practical data (tasks, events, weather) — concrete and specific
- 4-7 sentences total, tight prose, no padding
- Recent moments / open threads mentioned briefly at the END as context,
not as the lead
- Voice: "competent assistant briefing the user" not "friend writing a letter"
- Close with a short journal invitation under 8 words
Also dropped max_tokens 600 -> 400 to bias toward concision.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The structured prep card was data-rich but voiceless. Replaced with an
LLM-generated conversational opener — same shape the briefing's compilation
slot had — that renders as a normal assistant chat bubble at the top of
the day's conversation.
Backend (services/journal_prep.py):
- Renamed generate_daily_prep -> gather_daily_sections (still pure data
fetching, no LLM); kept the old name as a backwards-compat alias.
- New _generate_prep_prose: hands the gathered sections to generate_completion
with a warm-conversational system prompt; returns prose. Falls back to a
plain greeting if the LLM call fails or no model is configured.
- ensure_daily_prep_message now persists the prep as role='assistant' with
the prose as content. Structured sections stay on msg_metadata for
provenance. Auto-upgrades legacy system-role preps in place on next call.
Frontend:
- Drop the <article class="daily-prep"> structured block from JournalView.
The prep is now just the first chat bubble — picks up the existing
Illuminated Transcript styling automatically.
- Drop dayMessages / prepMessage / prepSections / asArray helpers — no
longer needed.
- ChatMessage hideMessage filter: comment refined to clarify it only
catches LEGACY system-role prep rows. Current preps are assistant-role
and render normally.
Net effect: open /journal -> first thing you see is a warm assistant bubble
that talks about your day -> input bar below to reply.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The journal UI was over-stripped earlier — weather panel, current-conditions
poll, and the upcoming-events sidebar were all dropped. Restored those (calls
the new /api/journal/weather, /api/journal/weather/current,
/api/journal/weather/refresh, /api/journal/weather/geocode endpoints).
Also: the daily-prep system message was rendering as flat text inside
ChatPanel because there's no .role-system bubble styling. Added a hideMessage
guard in ChatMessage so daily-prep system messages don't render in the chat
stream — they're already shown above as a structured prep card.
News / RSS reactions / article-discuss are intentionally NOT in the journal
(scoped out per user direction). The broader RSS infrastructure cleanup is
a separate, larger task.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bvandeusen