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Creating Briefs

Start a Brief from a chat — describe what you want, and Hamster comes back with a draft in its own thread.

Overview

Most Briefs are born in chat. You type "we should add tag-based filtering to Briefs," the AI agent replies in a child thread with a draft Brief, and a clickable card showing the new Brief lands in your conversation. From there you open the Brief, refine it, share it, and ship it. There is no separate Brief authoring wizard — chat is the entry point, and the Brief link is always visible in the agent's first reply.

You can also create a Brief without chat — from the Briefs list, from the CLI, or from the Hamster Chrome extension when you want to pin a URL to a new brief.

Briefs list view showing project briefs

How It Works

  1. Describe what you want in chat — Open a conversation and type what you'd like to ship. You can drop attachments alongside the prompt — .fig files, PDFs, markdown, images, or pasted URLs. The agent grounds the Brief in those attachments instead of treating them as decoration.

  2. The AI drafts the Brief in a child thread — Long answers and Brief drafts move into their own child thread automatically, keeping the parent chat clean. The agent's first reply includes a clickable Brief card so you can jump straight in.

  3. Or click "New Brief" in the Briefs list — If you'd rather start from a blank document, navigate to Briefs in the sidebar and click "New Brief" in the top-right. A dialog asks for a title (up to 255 characters) and an optional description.

  4. Open and edit — The editor opens with the AI chat panel alongside it, ready for your first prompt. The chat already has access to whatever the Brief contains.

  5. Save automatically — Everything you type is saved in real time. Collaborators see your changes as you make them.

Where Briefs Can Be Created

  • Hamster AI chat — the primary path. Brief creation runs in a spawned child thread so the parent conversation stays focused.
  • Briefs list — "New Brief" button in the top-right of the Briefs section.
  • CLI — create Briefs from your terminal with the Hamster CLI; positional Brief argument and URL parsing are supported. See CLI Brief Creation.
  • Chrome extension — pin the URL of any page you're reading to a new Brief, with the page acting as the first context document.
  • From a Slack message — when the Slack bot is connected, Brief creation can happen inline; the bot also posts the new Brief URL back to the originating Slack thread.

A descriptive title makes Briefs easier to find later. "Redesign the onboarding flow for mobile users" beats "Onboarding redesign."

Tips

  • A descriptive title makes Briefs easier to find later. "Redesign the onboarding flow for mobile users" beats "Onboarding redesign."
  • Drop the customer call recording, the Figma file, and the linked notion of what you've already tried into chat before asking for a brief. The agent uses everything attached as grounding.
  • If the agent comes back asking clarifying questions, answer them in the same thread — your answers persist across page refreshes, so you can keep iterating.
  • Use the search bar in the Briefs toolbar to find a Brief by title in real time. You don't need to press Enter.

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