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BERD TASK · 0004 · SET UP BERD

Make Home yours

Home is a canvas you pin things to, not a list you scroll. Half an hour of arranging it is the difference between a screen you pass through and a desk you work from. Everything here is reversible; Revert layout exists.

Steps at a glance

  1. Take the tour, once
  2. Right-click the canvas to pin what you reach for
  3. Arrange by use, not by category
  4. Name the areas with labels
  5. Recenter, clean up or revert from the canvas controls
  6. Treat the canvas as a working surface, not decoration

1. Take the tour, once

Berdy's callout on a fresh Home offers Take a tour. It is five steps — your canvas, your providers, a sample chat, agents, skills — each a sentence and a picture. Two minutes. If you dismissed the callout, the canvas controls include Reload onboarding tour, so nothing is lost.

[SCREENSHOT: T04-01 — the tour step 1]

2. Right-click the canvas to pin what you reach for

Right-click any empty space and a picker opens with a Pin header. Two families of thing can be pinned:

  • Widgets — a clock (analog or digital), a photo (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF or AVIF under 50 MB; original, square or circle), a sticky note with bold, italic and seven colour tones, a checklist, and a text label.
  • Your Berd objects — an agent, a chat, a project or a skill. Each opens a searchable list of what you have; an empty list says Nothing to pin. In distributions that enable automations (Block's internal build; not the v0.6.4 public release, which compiles VITE_AUTOMATIONS=0), a fifth entry pins an automation's latest output and shows its last run state — completed, failed, running, paused, never run.

A pinned chat can be enlarged to read its live transcript without leaving Home. Chats pinned to Home are also exempt from automatic archiving, which makes pinning the cheapest way to protect a chat you will come back to.

Two more pinnable things sit behind experiments: Chat on canvas (a pinned chat expands into a live, interactive card) and Prompt pins (a saved prompt that runs with one click, optionally with an attached agent). Experiments are off by default in production builds and are, by their own description, unstable.

[SCREENSHOT: T04-02 — right-click pin menu]

3. Arrange by use, not by category

Morgan, Berd's design lead, on Block's On The Block (September 2026), showed a Home that had grown with her work: projects as coloured cubes across the top, her seven agents in a row along the bottom with the skills and automations that belong to each stacked beside them, pinned chats down the right edge, a clock and a sticky note in the middle. Her phrase for the objects was "pieces to the puzzle", and her rule was that the canvas "evolves as the work evolves". (Morgan runs Block's internal distribution; the automation pins in her layout are not available in the public build.)

Copy the principle, not the layout. Put the agent you start most mornings with where your eye lands first. Put the project you are in this month next to it. Leave the rest off; a canvas of everything is a list again.

[SCREENSHOT: T04-03 — a lived-in canvas]

4. Name the areas with labels

A label is text placed directly on the canvas — Add a heading… — with a font size you can nudge up or down and five faces to choose from: Inter, Fraunces, Geist Mono, Comic Relief and Permanent Marker. Use two or three labels to name regions (Engagement A, My method, Inbox) and the canvas reads at a glance. Labels arrived with the refined starter layout in v0.6.3.

5. Recenter, clean up or revert from the canvas controls

The canvas controls carry four actions: Recenter brings the pinned objects back into view when you have panned off into space; Clean up pins tidies the arrangement; Revert layout puts the starter canvas back; and the tour reload from step 1. If Home was changed in another Berd window at the same time, you get a toast saying the widgets were refreshed and the last change should be tried again.

[SCREENSHOT: T04-04 — canvas controls]

6. Treat the canvas as a working surface, not decoration

Every pinned Berd object is a door. The public strings are explicit: a pinned agent's action is Start chat with {name}, a pinned project's is Start chat in {name}, a pinned skill's is again Start chat with {name}, a pinned chat opens or expands the chat. Morgan described a richer behaviour in the internal build — clicking a skill, an agent and a project "stacks them in the composer" as accumulating context — but that is not what the v0.6.4 strings say, so expect a chat to open and be pleased if it does more.

Start every session from Home for a week and the canvas will tell you what to keep and what to unpin.

Last checked: Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11 — read from source and release notes, not yet tested in the app.

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Reference

Moment
new
Takes
15 min
Steps
6
Verified
Berd v0.6.4 · 2026-09-11 · source-read
NEVER BESTUCK AGAINCLICK ME

Guide built with Berd, Claude and Codex · verified against Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11 · read from source, not yet tested in the app · Buzz Guide · About · not affiliated with Block