About this guide¶
The Berd Coach is a Digital Coach in the EnABLE sense: performance support built at the workflow, for the five moments of need, from a Rapid Workflow Analysis of the product's own sources. It is the single-player companion to the Buzz Guide, written for the same performer — a consultant running EnABLE engagements — for the half of the work that happens alone, before it goes multiplayer.
What it is made from¶
Berd v0.6.4, read at the v0.6.4 tag of block/berd on 2026-09-11: the bundled help skill and its ten reference files, the two builder skills, the monitor and orchestrator skills, the published Buzz Handoff skill, the seven persona files, the two architectural laws, the English UI strings, the settings section registry, the release workflow, and the changelog for v0.6.0 through v0.6.4. One experiential source: Block's On The Block episode on Buzz and Berd (September 2026). One article: Block's Designing AI with character (2026-08-18).
Every page carries a stamp. Read from source and release notes, not yet tested in the app is the current state of all of them — nobody on this project has yet worked a real engagement task in Berd, and the analysis says so rather than pretending otherwise. The next step is the validation session that stamps pages tested, captures the sixty-one planned screenshots, and times the tasks.
The analysis behind it¶
The Coach is the A5–A7 output of an Analyze to Design pass. The pass itself — scope statement, content analysis with the task hierarchy and ambiguity flags, the impact and complexity ratings, the workflow map, and this site's content contract — lives beside the site in the Berd analysis/ folder of the Buzzing project. Those ratings decided how much of each page could be written from sources and how closely it had to be reviewed: most tasks are full drafts, five carry a decision the practitioner has to make, and three are structure only until someone has run them by hand. The ratings themselves are production notes and stay in the analysis; they are not something a reader needs.
One finding changed the shape of the corpus during the pass: the public Berd build compiles several surfaces off — automations, in-app feedback, company-managed connections, skill discovery, dictation and the security classifiers — because they depend on Block-internal services. Pages about those carry a Not in the public build note rather than being removed, for the day a distribution you run enables them.
Design¶
The look is stolen, in the sense that matters, from berd.xyz and from Berd's own Home canvas: the paper, the dot grid, the mono eyebrow, the trading card with Good for and Vibes, the traffic lights, the neon accent set, the sticky-note tones. What is ours: the steps-at-a-glance sticky note, the clock that shows the version instead of the time, the six phase creatures, Sticky the coach, and the never be stuck again band. Fonts are Inter, Fraunces and Geist Mono — the three faces Berd offers for canvas labels — because Block's own typeface is not ours to use. Nothing in a content file references any of this; the templates derive every affordance from front matter and headings the corpus already follows.
House rules¶
- Release-dependent claims carry
Last checked: Berd vX.Y.Z, date. Every revision pass updates the stamps it touches, even when the text did not change. - Forward-looking content carries an outlook label with a stamp inside it.
- One word is retired from the corpus, and the build lint fails if it appears.
- Berd's help skill names where to look rather than labels; the Coach inherits that.
Not affiliated¶
This guide is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained by Block. Berd is Block's open-source product; report Berd bugs to block/berd/issues, and report errors in this guide to its author.
Last checked: Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11.