SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE · 0008
The Home canvas as a working surface¶
Home is a spatial canvas of pinned things, not a dashboard. Right-click it and you can pin a clock, a photo, a sticky note, a checklist, a text label, and any of the objects you actually work with: an agent, a chat, a project or a skill (and, in distributions that enable automations — not the v0.6.4 public build — the latest output of an automation). Since v0.6.3 new installs start with a refined layout and you can add labels, in five typefaces, to name areas of the canvas. Two experiments extend it: pinned chats that expand into live cards, and saved prompts pinned to Home that run with one click.
Morgan, Berd's design lead, on Block's On The Block (September 2026), described it as a spatial environment for your most-used ingredients, and said the point is that it evolves as the work evolves. Her own canvas showed projects as cubes at the top, seven agents along the bottom with their skills and automations stacked beside them, a sticky note, a clock, and pinned review chats at the edge. She runs Block's internal distribution; the automation pins are the one part of that layout a public build cannot reproduce.
Berdy's five-step tour starts from Home and covers the canvas, providers, chat, agents and skills; it can be reloaded later from the canvas controls, which also recenter, clean up and revert the layout.
Why it matters to you¶
The canvas is where Berd stops being a list of chats and becomes your workbench. A pinned agent is a place to start work with that agent; a pinned project is a place to start work in that project. The strings behind those pins say exactly that: Start chat with {name}, Start chat in {name}. Where automations are enabled, a pinned automation output shows its state (completed, failed, running, paused, never run) without opening anything.
Two things this page cannot tell you, because the sources do not say them. Morgan described the internal build as clicking a skill, an agent or a project and having them stack in the composer, adding context piece by piece. The public strings describe starting a chat, not stacking; which you will see in v0.6.4 is not verified. And nothing says whether a Home layout can be exported or moves with you to a new machine; treat it as local to this install until someone has tried.
What is verified: the layout is saved (a toast says so when saving fails), and Revert layout exists, so arranging is cheap to undo.
How to apply it¶
Arrange by what you reach for, not by category. Morgan's pattern is a reasonable start: agents where your hand goes first, their skills stacked next to them, projects above, chats at the edge.
Use labels to name areas ("This engagement", "House tools") so the canvas reads at a glance. Use a sticky note for the thing you keep forgetting, not for documentation.
In distributions that enable automations, pin an automation's output when checking it is part of your morning; the state badge tells you whether to look closer. In the public build, pin the chat that a berd-monitor run wakes instead — a pinned chat can be enlarged to read its transcript from Home.
Take the tour once, early, and reload it from the canvas controls if you skipped it. It names the five things Berd wants you to know exist.
Expect the canvas to change shape with each engagement. That is the intended use.
If you ignore this¶
Home stays a decorative welcome screen, and you navigate everything through the sidebar and search, which works but never gets faster. Or you build an elaborate layout, move laptops, and find that nothing says it will follow you.
Examples¶
A physical desk. The tools you use hourly are within reach; the ones for this project are in a stack to one side; last month's stack is in a drawer. Nobody files a desk by alphabet.
A consultant's canvas at the start of an engagement: the engagement project cube at the top, a label under it, Generalist and the source-checker agent below with the retired-words skill stacked beside them, a pinned chat in which a monitored summary of the client's shared folder lands each morning, and a checklist of validation questions for the SME session.
Pinning every agent, skill and project you own. The canvas then carries the same clutter as the lists it was meant to replace, and Clean up pins becomes a weekly chore.
Do it: Make Home yours
Last checked: Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11.
Reference¶
- block/berd — src/shared/i18n/locales/en/home.json — widgets, picker, canvas controls, tour steps, label fonts
- block/berd — CHANGELOG.md — v0.6.3, Home canvas and the two experiments
- Morgan, Berd's design lead, on Block's On The Block (September 2026) — the canvas as ingredients that evolve with the work
- Verified
- Berd v0.6.4 · 2026-09-11