The developer's complete Dailybot setup

Getting started with Dailybot as a developer means more than creating an account. A proper setup connects your daily tools—your IDE, your coding agent, and your team’s communication channels—into a single workflow where progress is visible and friction is low. This guide walks through every step, from first install to the moment your coding agent’s work shows up in your team’s feed automatically.

Install Dailybot in your chat platform

Dailybot lives where your team already communicates. Start by adding the Dailybot app to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Discord. An admin on your workspace grants the initial permissions, but individual developers should also authorize their own accounts so Dailybot can send personal reminders and collect check-in responses.

After installation, verify you can see Dailybot’s messages in your direct messages or a designated channel. If your organization uses SSO, confirm your identity is linked—otherwise check-in responses may not map to the correct profile.

Connect your coding agent

Modern development teams often run one or more coding agents—Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or others. Dailybot acts as the observability layer for those agents, collecting progress reports and surfacing them alongside human updates.

Agent reporting basics

Each coding agent can send structured updates to Dailybot through the reporting script or API. The typical flow is:

1. Add the reporting script to your agent’s environment. For CLI-based agents, this means sourcing the Dailybot report command in your shell profile or CI pipeline.
2. Authenticate the agent with your Dailybot API key or by running the login command.
3. Configure metadata so every report includes the model name, repository, and branch. Most of this is auto-detected, but verify it once by sending a test report.

Once connected, the agent sends progress updates after significant work—feature completions, bug fixes, refactors—without manual intervention.

Supported agents

Dailybot works with any agent that can execute a shell command or HTTP request. Dedicated guides exist for Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot, but the pattern is the same: authenticate, configure metadata, and report after meaningful commits.

Join your team’s check-ins

Check-ins are Dailybot’s core async ritual. Your team lead or ops person has likely already created one—commonly a daily standup that asks what you accomplished, what you plan to do, and what is blocking you.

Responding to check-ins

When a check-in fires, Dailybot sends you a direct message at the scheduled time. Reply conversationally or use structured responses depending on the format your team chose. Your answers appear in a shared feed so the team stays aligned without a synchronous meeting.

Tips for useful responses

Keep responses concrete. Instead of “worked on the API,” say “finished the pagination endpoint and opened a PR.” Mention blockers explicitly so detection workflows can route them to the right person. If your coding agent handled most of the work, reference what it completed and what you reviewed.

Configure notification preferences

Dailybot sends several types of notifications: check-in reminders, blocker alerts, kudos, digest summaries, and agent heartbeat escalations. Not every developer needs all of them.

Adjusting frequency and channels

In your Dailybot settings, you can control which notifications arrive as DMs versus channel posts, set quiet hours so alerts respect your focus time, and disable categories that are not relevant to your role. A common developer setup keeps check-in reminders and blocker alerts active while muting digest summaries that are more useful for managers.

Integrating with your IDE workflow

If you spend most of your day in the IDE, configure Dailybot’s notifications to appear in your chat client’s sidebar rather than as email. This keeps context switches minimal. Some teams also set up a dedicated “agent-updates” channel so coding agent reports have their own stream separate from human conversation.

Set up agent reporting in your projects

For each repository where your coding agent operates, ensure the reporting configuration is in place. This usually means:

• A reporting script or hook that fires after commits or at defined intervals.
• Metadata fields (repository name, branch, model) correctly populated.
• The target channel or dashboard where reports should land.

Test by triggering a small agent task and verifying the report appears in Dailybot within a few seconds. If the report does not arrive, check authentication, network access, and metadata configuration in that order.

Verify the full loop

A complete setup means the following cycle works without manual steps:

1. Check-in fires at the scheduled time and you receive a DM.
2. You respond with your update, including anything the agent accomplished.
3. Your coding agent reports progress independently when it finishes meaningful work.
4. Both updates appear in the team feed, giving managers and teammates a unified picture.
5. Blockers surface through check-in answers or agent escalations, and the right person is notified.

Run through this cycle once end to end. If any link is broken—missing notification, report not posting, blocker not routing—fix it now so the system is trustworthy from day one.

Common setup pitfalls

Authentication mismatch: your chat identity and Dailybot profile are not linked, so responses go to an unknown user. Re-authorize through Dailybot’s settings.

Agent reporting silently fails: the API key expired or the network blocks outbound requests from your dev container. Send a manual test report to isolate the issue.

Too many notifications on day one: start with check-in reminders only, then add blocker alerts after the first week once you see the team’s volume.

A well-configured Dailybot installation turns your daily workflow into a transparent, low-friction process. Your coding agent reports what it did, you add the human context, and the team sees everything in one place—without extra meetings, status emails, or manual dashboards.