Topics
Topics are subjects you want a future newsletter to cover. They give the AI a hint about what to focus on so newsletters stay aligned with what your team actually cares about.
How topics work
When Abstractions generates a newsletter, it looks at the pending topic queue for that repository. The next topic in the queue becomes the primary focus of the newsletter draft. After the newsletter is sent, the topic is marked as sent and removed from the queue.
If there are no pending topics, Abstractions generates a newsletter based on general recent activity.
Use topics to ensure important work gets highlighted — for example, "Q3 performance improvements" or "new authentication flow". Topics keep newsletters focused instead of covering everything.
Auto-generated topics
When you trigger newsletter generation and the topic queue is empty, Abstractions doesn't fail — it generates topics automatically before continuing.
Here's what that process does:
- Activity window — Abstractions looks at files modified in the last 7 days, using the indexed chunk summaries as the source of truth.
- Topic proposal — The file summaries (up to 200 files) are passed to your generation model, which proposes up to 5 topic candidates ranked by significance.
- De-duplication — Topics are compared against the last 4 sent newsletters to avoid repeating recently covered subjects.
- Queue insertion — The resulting topics are added to your queue in ranked order, and the first one is immediately used for the current newsletter.
Auto-generated topics show up in your topic queue after generation completes. You can edit, reorder, or delete them just like manually created ones.
If your repository has no recent file activity (nothing changed in the last 7 days) and your queue is empty, Abstractions won't have enough signal to generate topics and the newsletter will fail with a "no topics available" error. Trigger a manual index or add topics manually to unblock it.
Adding a topic
- Open a repository and go to Topics
- Click Add topic
- Enter a title and an optional description
- Save
The topic is added to the end of the queue.
Reordering the queue
Topics are sent in queue order. To change the order:
- Use the up/down arrows on each topic card to move it earlier or later in the queue
The next topic up is always shown prominently so you know what the next newsletter will focus on.
Editing and deleting topics
To edit a topic, click the edit icon on the topic card. You can update the title and description.
To delete a topic, click the delete icon and confirm. Deleting a topic removes it from the queue permanently.
Sent topics
Topics that have already been covered in a sent newsletter are listed in a separate Sent section. You can see when each topic was covered and which newsletter it appeared in.
Next steps
- Newsletters — generate and send newsletters
- Repositories — configure repository settings