v2.7.15: Signing Up Takes Two Fields, Hiring Takes One Click, and Webhooks Come to the Free Tier
Two days in, the free tier has taught us plenty. Most of this release is a direct answer to watching real people sign up for the first time.
Signing up now takes two fields
The old form asked for your company, your language, your timezone, your phone number, your date of birth and your gender before you had seen a single thing the product does. That is a lot of faith to ask from someone who is still deciding whether to bother.
Now it asks for your first name and your last name. That is it, plus a password if you are creating one.
Your language and timezone are detected from your browser instead of being a question. Everything else moved to your profile, where you can fill it in later if you ever want to.
If you sign up with Google or Microsoft, your name is already filled in and you just confirm it. Microsoft accounts that only report a full name rather than separate first and last names now work properly too, which was a small gap worth closing.
The free tier login page also stopped flickering. It shows a brief loading state and then your Google and Microsoft buttons, instead of flashing an email and password form you cannot use.
Hiring your first employee is now one click
Previously, clicking New Employee took you to a page that asked you to choose between two ways of hiring, and then you chose again. A menu in front of a menu.
That middle screen is gone. New Employee now opens the catalog directly, where you can see actual employees and pick one.
If you finish signing up without an employee, the catalog opens on its own, because an empty dashboard is not a helpful place to leave someone on their first day.
And if nobody in the catalog fits, there is now a line at the bottom that says so: can't find the right fit, create your custom employee. One click takes you to guided hire, where you build exactly the role you need. That option always existed. It was just hiding.
Webhooks arrive on the free tier
This one changed our minds. Webhooks were on the excluded list when we launched two days ago, and enough of you asked that we looked again.
They are in. Free tier accounts get one webhook per employee, which is plenty to connect a form, a cron job, or a deploy notification and see your employee react to the outside world. The panel is visible, your webhook shows up in it, and the button politely stops you at one rather than letting you find out by failing.
The webhook skill your employee uses is available too, so you can simply ask them to set one up. We also added a testing section to its documentation, including how to fire a test payload yourself and how to inspect what an external service actually sends before you wire it up for real. That second tip saves an afternoon.
Guardrails you can see and correct
Guardrails protect your employees from misuse. They only work if you can tell when they get it wrong.
Admins now have a panel listing every blocked message, with the prompt and the reason it was blocked. Before this, a false positive was invisible, and the only clue was a confused user.
We used it immediately. One rule was flagging people who simply mentioned testing the guardrails, which is a perfectly ordinary thing to say and not an attempt to get around anything. That rule is now much more precise. In the other direction, we closed a real gap around solicitation and sexual exploitation, which was slipping through.
Rule changes also take effect on the very next message now, instead of waiting on a cache. Spot a bad rule, fix it, done.
The pattern
Everything here removes a step that existed for our convenience rather than yours. Fields nobody needed to answer yet. A menu in front of a menu. A feature list drawn slightly too tight. A safety system you had to take on faith.
