Weekly Product Notes: Collaboration, Sheets, and Cleaner Tools

This retrospective covers April 7 through April 13, 2026.

The second week of April moved Bridge Town from single-user modeling toward shared project work.

Collaboration became more concrete, Google Sheets became a real operating surface instead of a thin connector, and the MCP tool catalog kept moving toward fewer surprises. It was also the week the product language shift from repos to projects became much more complete.

Projects became the public model

The repo-to-project migration moved through the web app, backend routes, MCP tools, docs, prompts, privacy copy, and API clients.

This was not just a find-and-replace. Routes moved from /api/repos toward /api/projects, tool docs moved into project-oriented sections, tests were updated to catch stale terminology, and API fields were aligned so project names showed up consistently across app and agent workflows.

The practical outcome is that Bridge Town became easier to explain: users work with projects, not repositories.

Collaboration became a product surface

Private project collaboration landed across REST, MCP, and the web app.

The week added collaborator management, pending grants, workspace invite acceptance, branch creation, merge request workflows, review flows, approval gating, activity events, and notification hooks. Owners gained UI controls for collaborators, branch work, and internal template publishing, while agents gained MCP surfaces for the same underlying workflows.

That made Bridge Town feel more like a shared finance workspace. A model can be created, shared, reviewed, and promoted without treating every change as an informal handoff.

Google Sheets became more capable

Google Sheets work expanded sharply.

Bridge Town added connection guidance, onboarding skills, source-name resolution, spreadsheet metadata discovery, batched value operations, structure mutations, formatting tools, and query support for snapshots. It also fixed a number of auth and session issues around Google OAuth, including middleware token injection and missing session cookies during authorize flows.

By the end of the week, Sheets were no longer just an import/export edge. They were becoming a managed data source with discoverable structure, repeatable formatting, and safer connection semantics.

Formatting presets made Sheets more finance-friendly

The team added opinionated formatting presets for financial tables, KPI dashboards, audit logs, and related sheet layouts.

The presets were refined for idempotency, raw-value snapshots, existing number-format preservation, and clearer docs around gid, sheetId, and sheet_id. Formatting skills were published so agents could discover and apply these workflows more naturally.

This matters because spreadsheet polish is not decorative in finance. Number formats, headers, and table structure affect whether someone trusts the output.

The MCP catalog was trimmed and structured

The tool surface continued to consolidate.

Bridge Town added deferred loading tiers, structured error paths, per-tool rate limits, stronger rate-limit atomicity, optimistic concurrency for write tools, list and discovery helpers, and response-shape documentation in tool descriptions. It also reworked several tool boundaries: project creation, run listing, skill discovery, data source listing, chart type listing, and run retrieval all moved toward clearer single-purpose contracts.

There was some back-and-forth as contracts were tested against real workflows. The direction stayed consistent: fewer hidden behaviors, more explicit inputs, and better discovery for agents.

Support operations got their first control plane

Support tooling also appeared this week.

Bridge Town added support read models, reporting queries, identity and subscription actions, agent-facing support MCP tools, an operator console stub, runbooks, and fail-closed production coverage. That work was paired with middleware and audit tests so support access could be operational without becoming a hidden security bypass.

It is early support infrastructure, but it gives the product a path to help customers without manually querying production state.

What this means

By April 13, Bridge Town had shifted in three important ways:

• Projects were now the user-facing unit of work.
• Collaboration had real workflow primitives.
• Google Sheets had enough structure to support finance workflows, not just file movement.
• MCP tools were becoming easier for agents to inspect and use safely.
• Support operations had a bounded, auditable starting point.

This week turned the product from “run a model” toward “operate a shared planning system.”