Asks
Asks gives you an answer about your work the moment you need one. Type what you want to know, and Asks pulls from check-ins, goals, and your activity integrations to put the answer together. No digging through tools, no waiting for someone to reply. It’s the one-off counterpart to Echoes, which delivers the same kind of answer on a schedule.
Using Asks
Select the speech bubble icon in the sidebar, or press a from anywhere in Steady.
- Type a question or prompt into the field and submit it. Simple questions like “Who’s out this week?” work, and so do more involved prompts like “Summarize the major progress the Design and Dev teams made last week, and include any related pull requests”.
- Every question you ask is saved in the history panel, grouped by week. Select any entry to reopen its answer.
- Open the ••• menu on an answer to copy a link to it or to save the prompt as an Echo.
Your Asks are yours alone. Answers are built only from the data you already have access to in Steady, and your history isn’t visible to anyone else.
Turning an Ask into an Echo
When you find yourself asking the same question week after week, make it recurring instead.
- Open the ••• menu on the answer and select “Save as Echo”.
- Steady opens a new Echo with your prompt already filled in.
- Pick a cadence and delivery time, then save. Answers land in your Digest from then on.
Asks or Echoes?
Both answer the same kinds of questions from the same data. The difference is timing.
- Use Asks for questions you have right now: prepping for a meeting that starts in five minutes, catching up after time off, checking whether anyone is blocked before you dive into your own work.
- Use Echoes for questions you’ll have again: a Monday morning read on slipping goals, a pre-1:1 summary of what someone worked on, a bi-weekly list of what shipped.
Best practices
- Ask the way you’d ask a teammate. You don’t need to be a prompt engineer to get a good answer.
- Be specific about scope. “Give me a progress report for the Design and Engineering teams” beats “tell me everything going on”.
- Say what shape you want the answer in. “List every PR merged last week with a one-line summary of each” and “Summarize this week’s check-ins for non-technical leadership” will both be honored.
- Follow the source links in an answer when a detail matters. They take you straight to the check-in, goal update, or activity the answer drew from.
Asks from the CLI or the API
Asks is available in the CLI and the Steady API, so you can put a question to Steady from a terminal or a script without switching to the app. You can ask a new question, list the questions you’ve already asked, and read their answers. Anything asked this way lands in your Asks history alongside the rest.
steady asks create '{"prompt":"Which goals are slipping, and why?"}'
steady asks
For endpoint details, see the Asks API reference.
Data use and privacy
- No training on your data: We use enterprise-grade vendors to generate answers, with contractual agreements to never use your data for training purposes.
- No permission leaks: Asks can only access the data you already have access to in Steady. There’s no risk of seeing content you shouldn’t.
- Human-sourced inputs: All inputs are human-generated, and therefore inherently more trustworthy than systems that encourage generative input.
- Auditable answers: Answers include links to the source material used to create them. You can always audit an answer to verify that it’s correct and trustworthy.