Key takeaways:
- Goal updates usually fail one of two ways: hours of manual archaeology across tools, or AI-written summaries that read like nobody wrote them.
- With Steady’s MCP server connected to Claude (or any MCP-aware assistant), you split the job: the assistant assembles the raw material from your tools and past updates; you write the narrative.
- The whole flow happens in one conversation — no context switching — and the finished update lands in Steady where subscribers get notified automatically.
Goal updates are one of those rituals that everyone agrees is valuable and nobody enjoys writing.
You sit down to write what feels like a quick status update, and twenty minutes later you’re still excavating. Open the project tracker for shipped tickets. Open GitHub to see what landed. Re-read the last update so you don’t repeat yourself. Try to recall the conversation last Tuesday where the scope shifted. Then — finally — write a few paragraphs that turn all of that into something readable for the people subscribed to the goal.
Most attempts to fix this end up at one of two extremes:
- Pure manual. You do the archaeology yourself. The update is faithful, but it costs you 30–60 minutes you didn’t plan for, and you write it less often than you should.
- Pure AI. You ask ChatGPT or Claude to “summarize my week” and paste the result. It’s fast, but it reads like nobody actually wrote it. The narrative — why this work mattered, what changed, what you’re worried about — is gone.
The interesting middle path is splitting the responsibilities. Let the AI assistant do what it’s good at: pulling structured data, summarizing activity, surfacing what’s already been said. Keep the part that only you can do: the framing, the judgment calls, the honest read on confidence.
That’s what Steady’s MCP server enables, and it’s the workflow I want to walk through.
What this looks like in practice
Once you’ve connected Steady to Claude (we’re rolling out the beta now), writing a goal update is one conversation.
Open Claude. Pick the goal you want to update. Then have a normal exchange like this:
You: From Steady, pull up the goal “Q2 onboarding redesign”. Show me my last update, current progress and confidence, and the activity from the past week — Linear issues closed, GitHub PRs merged, anything in my recent check-ins that touched this goal.
Claude calls into Steady’s MCP server and comes back with the form definition for the update (the fields, the current values), the previous update so you can see what you said last time, and the relevant activity from your connected tools.
You read it. You notice that two of the closed issues were actually descoped, not finished. You notice that the previous update was more optimistic than where things actually stand. You start writing:
You: Draft a body that opens with the redesign of the third onboarding screen — that’s the visible win this week. Then a paragraph on the descoped issues and why we made that call. Keep my voice; don’t add hype. Confidence stays at 60 — we’re behind on the second cohort.
Claude drafts. You edit. You ask it to tighten the second paragraph. You change “blockers” to “open questions” because that’s how you actually talk about it.
Then:
You: Save it as a goal update in Steady. Title: “Onboarding redesign — week 17”. Progress 55, confidence 60.
Done. The update lands in Steady. Goal subscribers get notified through whatever channel they’ve opted into — Slack, email, Microsoft Teams, the daily digest. You never opened the Steady app or switched tabs.
What’s actually happening underneath
When Claude pulls together that update, it’s calling a small set of tools that Steady’s MCP server exposes:
goal_update_form— returns the goal’s current title, progress, confidence, and the structure of the update form. This is what lets Claude know which fields exist and what the current values are.activities— returns work items from your connected integrations (GitHub PRs, Jira tickets, Linear issues, etc.) for the people and date range you ask about.goal_updates— returns the history of updates on this goal, so the new one can build on what was already said.save_goal_update— writes the finished update back to Steady, triggering the same subscriber notifications you’d get if you wrote it in the app.
You don’t need to know any of those names to use this. You just have a conversation. But it’s worth understanding the shape of it: each tool does one thing, on data you already have access to, scoped to your account.
If you use Steady’s goal update templates today, you already know the value of having a structure to fill in rather than a blank page. We’re working on bringing those templates into the MCP flow too — same scaffolding, same prompts, just available inside Claude or whichever assistant you’re using.
Why this matters
Two reasons this is more interesting than “AI writes your update for you.”
You stay in control of the narrative. Goal updates aren’t status reports. The point isn’t to list what shipped — your project tracker already does that. The point is to give the people subscribed to the goal your read on the work: what changed, what you’re worried about, where you’re more or less confident than you were last week. That part has to come from you. The AI assistant just spares you the assembly.
The loop closes automatically. Because the update lives in Steady and not in a Claude conversation, every subscriber to the goal gets it through their preferred channel. No copying and pasting into Slack. No “did you see this?” follow-ups. The update goes from your head to the people who care about it without you doing the distribution work.
The context compounds. Saved updates don’t just notify people — they stay in Steady as part of the goal’s running narrative. Next time you open Claude to draft an update, that history is what gets pulled in alongside the latest activity. The story builds on itself instead of starting from scratch every week.
That’s the broader pitch for Steady’s MCP server: your existing AI tools, doing the assembly; Steady, doing the coordination.
Try it on a real goal
If you’d like early access, join the beta list. Bring a goal you’ve been putting off updating. The first one usually takes a few minutes longer than you’d expect — you’re working out the prompts that fit how you write. After that, it’s faster than the manual flow ever was, and the updates are better, because you’re not writing them tired at 5pm on a Friday.
We’d love feedback on what works, what’s awkward, and what tools we should expose next.