I pasted two pages of raw meeting notes into my coding agent and asked for minutes. What came back was a tidy chronological summary: who spoke first, what they said, who replied, what they said next. It read well. It was also useless — nobody could tell what the meeting had actually decided, and the three follow-ups mentioned in passing had no owners and no dates.
The problem was not the agent. "Write up the minutes" is a vibe, not a procedure. So I wrote the procedure down as a skill, and the agent has followed it since.
The one rule that changes everything
Minutes are not a transcript with better formatting. They exist so that someone who missed the meeting can catch up in 3 minutes — and so attendees know exactly what they owe.
That means everything gets sorted into exactly three buckets:
- Decisions — one per line, phrased as "Decided to do X", never "Discussed X".
- Action items — each must have an owner and a deadline. No exceptions.
- Open questions — what is still undecided, what is blocking it, and who owns the next step.
And the whole thing opens conclusion-first: at most 3 lines on what the meeting decided, before any detail.
The part agents get wrong: inventing the missing pieces
Raw notes are messy. "Draft the proposal by next Wednesday" — whose job is that? The notes don't say. A helpful-sounding agent will guess a name, or quietly drop the deadline, and the minutes become fiction with good formatting.
The skill forbids that, explicitly:
- If the notes name no owner, mark the item
[unassigned]. If no deadline, mark[TBD]. - Names, dates, and numbers that are not in the notes must not appear. Mark missing ones
[to confirm]. - No editorializing. Not "Maria's proposal seemed shaky" — only "Maria's proposal was rejected because…" and only if a reason was actually stated.
Marking a gap is more useful than hiding one. [unassigned] in the minutes is a to-do for the team; an invented owner is a bug nobody notices until the deadline passes.
A minimal example
Input (raw notes excerpt):
...James said the login page is too slow, Maria suggested adding a cache layer, everyone agreed it's worth a pilot; draft the proposal by next Wednesday; pricing strategy still open, invite Finance next time...
Output:
## Meeting minutes (example)
**Bottom line**: Pilot a cache layer to speed up the login page; pricing strategy undecided, pending a session with Finance.
### Decisions
- Adopt a cache layer for login-page performance (pilot first, not a full rollout).
### Action items
- [ ] Maria: draft the caching proposal, due next Wednesday `[date to confirm]`
- [ ] [unassigned]: schedule pricing discussion with Finance `[time TBD]`
### Open questions
- Pricing strategy: no decision reached; the action-item owner will book a dedicated session with Finance.
Notice what the output refuses to do: it does not turn "next Wednesday" into a calendar date, and it does not assign the Finance meeting to whoever was mentioned last. The brackets are the honest part.
Two more constraints that keep minutes honest
Length control. The minutes body must be at most 1/3 the length of the raw notes. Longer means the agent summarized instead of distilling — redo it. This single ratio kills most chronological bloat.
Self-check before output. Before returning anything, the agent verifies: does every action item have an owner? A deadline? Are decisions affirmative statements? Do open questions have a next step? Any "no" gets flagged in the output, not glossed over.
The skill
This is one of five free, MIT-licensed skills in a small pack I maintain — the others cover commit messages, code review, technical-writing proofreading, and structured deep research. Each one is a single SKILL.md file: copy the folder into your agent's skills directory and it applies the workflow without being re-explained every session.
Repo: https://github.com/alapha888/agent-skills-en — the meeting-notes skill is under skills/meeting-notes/, including the full anti-pattern list (chronological minutes, ownerless action items, invented details, decisions written as discussion).
If your team has a different minutes format, fork the file and change the buckets. The format is the easy part; the discipline — conclusion first, owners or brackets, nothing invented — is the part worth keeping.
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