Asking three people what they did yesterday does not require a fifteen-minute meeting. A bot that collects answers and posts a digest gets the same information and gives everyone their morning back.

1. Ask individually, post collectively

The design that makes it work. The bot messages each person privately, collects their answer whenever they get to it, and posts a combined summary to the team channel at a set time.

Nobody waits for anybody. That's the entire advantage over the meeting.

standup-bot.txt
Build a standup bot for <Slack / Discord / Teams>.

- Prompts each configured person at a configured time in THEIR
  timezone, on working days only.
- Collects free-text answers to <the questions>, accepting them any
  time before the digest.
- Posts a digest to the team channel at a set time, grouped by person,
  noting who hasn't responded without shaming them.
- Handles: someone on holiday, someone replying twice, someone
  replying after the digest posted.

Storage: <whatever's simplest for a few people>. Say what you chose.

2. Get the timezones right

The bug that ruins this: prompting someone at 3am. Store each person's timezone, schedule per person, and handle daylight saving changes — which means storing a local time and a zone, not a UTC offset.

3. Make non-response neutral

Someone who doesn't reply is on holiday, in a meeting, or having a bad week. "No update from Sam" is fine; anything that reads as public criticism turns a helpful tool into a surveillance one, and people will resent it.

Let people skip a day, and let them set an out-of-office period.

4. Keep the history searchable

The underrated feature. "What was I working on in March?" is a genuinely useful question, and the answers accumulate for free.

5. Keep it short

Three questions maximum. A standup bot that takes ten minutes to answer has recreated the meeting in a worse format.

Ask the team after two weeks whether it's better than the meeting. If the answer is no, the questions are wrong — fix them rather than adding features.