A Quieter AICoven, and a Shelf for the Work

AICoven grew one feature at a time, and for a while it looked like it. The redesign started from a shorter list: eight things a person wants from it, such as keeping their worlds apart, picking up where they left off, and handing something off and trusting it. Patrick made the calls, job by job, from throwaway prototypes. Anything that served none of the eight was hidden, defaulted, or moved to setup.

The redesign and Send To arrive in AICoven 3.1.0, out next week. The Asset Library itself is already in 3.0.0.

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What changed in the app

The Overview is where you come back to. Open the app and you land on the Overview of the coven you last used on that device: when you were last here, what's still open, what happened while you were away, and how many tasks are open. Switching to another coven shows its Overview too.

Less noise. There are no number badges. Something waiting for you is a small ink square and a few words, such as "Needs your OK". In Tasks, Do it for me… asks which of the coven's agents should take the task, and the row then says so: "Led by Cody", "Cody is on it", "Cody finished".

Notifications say who needs what. The title is the agent and the state ("Cody finished", "Scout needs your OK"), the subtitle is the coven and thread, and the body is the exact thing. Approve once and Deny sit on the notification only for a request AICoven knows is a read and can show in full, and on iPhone they need Face ID. On a device running the new app, the text of an agent's notification is sealed to that device, so Apple's push service and Firebase carry only ciphertext. A coven with Keep details out of notifications on says only what kind of thing happened, such as "Something finished".

Your Mac can sleep. If an agent runs through your Mac and the Mac is asleep, a message from your iPhone no longer fails. The thread says "Paused · your Mac is asleep", with "Your message sends by itself when your Mac wakes."

The Asset Library

Chat coordinates the work, and assets are the work. Each coven has Assets: images, mockups, charts, datasets, briefs, and social creatives, made by you or the coven's agents.

An agent can make an asset and Propose for Review. Only a person can Approve it, because the agent that made something can't vouch for it. Approved is the signal that this is the version to work from.

Each asset says Who can read it, chosen when it's created and fixed after that. Only this coven is the default: "Encrypted at rest with your workspace key." AICoven can read is the other choice, and the app says plainly what it trades. The title and the file name aren't encrypted, and the app says that too, where you type them.

Then there's Send To, one menu for every place the work can go. Three stay inside AICoven:

• Agent… hands the asset to one agent in this coven, or to several at once, each in its own thread. The agent gets a reference to the asset. Files and keys aren't copied.
• Another Coven… copies an approved asset into another of your covens and hands it to an agent there. The copy arrives as proposed, because a review in one coven means nothing in the next.
• Link… makes an expiring, revocable link to a copy of an approved asset. It's sealed on your device, lasts 1, 7, or 30 days, and has downloads on or off. If the asset's files change later, the link is marked out of date.

Four go to apps the coven is connected to. Each is offered only when the coven uses your own account for that app on Read and make changes; on Read, it shows disabled with "Allow changes in this coven's Connections to send here." Each opens a review step with exactly what will be sent, where it lands, and who can read it there. Only a person sends: no agent, automation, or Workspace MCP client can.

• Notion… and Google Docs… copy an approved text, Markdown, or brief asset, as Markdown, into a new Notion page under a page the coven can reach, or a new Doc in your My Drive.
• Slack… posts an approved asset to one of the coven's channels, as you: its own text when it's 4,000 characters or fewer, otherwise its title, followed by an Open in AICoven link that opens only for people who can read the asset. It goes through the same draft as an agent's Slack message, approved when you tap Post, and AICoven can't delete it afterwards.
• Google Slides… turns an approved deck into a new presentation in your My Drive, each slide on the matching Slides layout with its text editable. An image slide keeps its title and caption but not its picture, because Google Slides takes pictures only from a public link.

A deck is a new kind of asset: slides on five fixed layouts (title, section, title and content, two columns, and image), saved like any other asset, by you or an agent. Export As… writes a deck to PowerPoint, PDF, or HTML (in a Light or Dark template) on your device, to save or share from there. The file is yours, so it isn't recorded in Sent To.

Every copy sent to an app is listed on the asset under Sent To: the app, when, by whom, Current or Out of date once the asset's files change, Disconnected once that account is, and Open in the app. Send Current Version… sends it again. Changes made in the app don't come back, and a copy is removed in the app, not from AICoven.

What isn't there yet

Files over 10 MB are built and switched off. Send To can't yet reach a coding agent on your Mac; that's specced and waiting its turn. Memory doesn't yet show where each thing on the page came from or how often it was used, and About me lives only in Strix for now. And agent faces made it onto the Live Activity before they made it onto notifications, an order that only makes sense from the inside.

The app is calmer than it was, and the work finally has a place to sit that isn't the middle of a conversation.