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The week board

This week is where a round of pairings takes shape. Every round belongs to a week keyed to a Monday; the arrows at the top step between weeks along your cadence, and History lists them all.

A week is always in one of four states, shown under the date:

State Meaning
Not generated No groups yet — the page tells you how many people are eligible.
Draft Groups exist and can be edited, regenerated, or discarded freely.
Locked Counts as history, but the announcement hasn't been emailed yet.
Sent Finalized and emailed. The board is read-only unless you reopen it.

Generating

Generate pairings builds the groups: pairs, plus exactly one trio when the eligible count is odd. The matcher avoids repeats two ways — anyone paired in the last month is off-limits entirely, and anyone paired in the last 12 weeks costs more the fresher the meeting was. Only when the roster leaves no acceptable arrangement does it allow a repeat, and then it picks the least-recent one and tells you in an amber banner rather than failing.

  • Generation is deterministic: the same roster and week give the same groups, so pressing Generate twice changes nothing.
  • Reshuffle is the button for "same rules, different arrangement".
  • Regenerate rebuilds from scratch after the roster changed.

If AI pairing is configured, the first pass is Generate with AI — Claude arranges the groups following your standing instructions ("mix the departments", "pair newcomers with old hands"). It never sees names or email addresses, recent-pairing history is still respected, and if it's unavailable or proposes a poor arrangement the standard matcher steps in automatically.

Regenerating discards hand edits

If you've moved people by hand, Generate/Reshuffle asks first — a rebuilt board starts over. Held-out people stay held out, though.

Reading the board

Groups render as numbered cards; each member chip shows name and email. Tags flag anything unusual: trio, a hand-made group of 4+ (amber), someone left on their own (amber), or a chip marked paused / has left.

Above the board, banners call out what needs attention:

  • Repeat pairings this week (amber) — who met recently and when ("Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper met 3 weeks ago"), whether the matcher was forced into it or you paired them by hand.
  • People in a group who shouldn't be (red) — someone paused or left after generation. They're already excluded from the copyable address list, but the groups still show them: regenerate, or move them out by hand.
  • Off-cadence week — you're looking at a week between planned cycles. You can still generate here as a one-off.

Editing by hand

The board works on a simple gesture: click someone to pick them up, then click where they should go.

  • Click a second person → they swap places (both group sizes stay intact).
  • Click a group's move here button → they move into that group.
  • While someone is selected, an action bar offers Own group (start a new group with just them), Hold out (exclude them from this week), and Cancel. Esc also cancels.

Hand edits are checked against history too — put two people together who had coffee three weeks ago and the repeat banner says so.

Below the board, three side lists appear when they have anyone in them:

  • Not in a group — eligible but unplaced, usually people who accepted after generation. Click to place them, or regenerate.
  • Held out this week — excluded on purpose, with a Bring back button. Holding out survives regeneration; it's the right tool for "skip Ada just this once" (for longer absences, pause them from the roster).
  • Sitting out this week — excluded automatically by a pause or a slower personal cadence, with the reason shown ("paired every 4 weeks — last on Jan 6, due again Feb 3").

When the groups look right

Scroll down to The email — previewing, wording, finalizing, and sending are covered in Sending the email.

History

History lists every week — its status (sent / locked / draft / empty), group and people counts, and last change — with Plan next week jumping to the next cycle on your cadence. Every locked or sent cycle counts toward repeat-avoidance, whether or not it was emailed.