The single artifact that carries an idea from "we should do this" to a pull request.
A Brief is the spine of Hamster Studio. One Brief is one team-aligned unit of "what we're going to ship" — title, description, Plan of parent Tasks and subtasks, tags, status, alignment votes, and a deliver button that hands the work to either Cloud Agents or your own CLI. Everything else in the product — Initiatives, Hamster Chat, Plan generation, Delivery, sync — exists in service of getting Briefs to a state where the Team will commit to them and an AI agent can deliver on them.
Briefs are where the Refine → Align → Deliver loop plays out. You refine a Brief in chat until the scope is sharp. You align the team by sharing it and collecting alignment votes. You deliver by pressing one button and getting a PR back, without leaving the brief.
Most Briefs start in chat: you describe what you want, the AI agent comes back with a draft Brief in its own thread, and you take it from there. Briefs are also the spec layer the AI consumes — the clearer the Brief, the better the Plan and the better the delivery.
You can deliver a Brief to GitHub directly from a conversation — just tell Hamster what to ship, and it dispatches the job inline, without leaving the chat.