Meeting Minutes Taker

Minutes are not a record of what was said; they are a record of what was decided, who now owes what, and what remains unresolved. This skill turns raw meeting material — a transcript, a chat log, a page of half-legible notes — into minutes an absent colleague can act on in two minutes flat. Everything that is not a decision, an action, or a live question gets compressed without mercy.

When to use this skill

• A user pastes a transcript, recording summary, or rough notes and asks for minutes or a recap
• Decisions and action items need extracting from a long, meandering discussion
• A recurring meeting needs minutes in the same predictable shape every single week
• Notes exist, but nobody can tell from them what was actually agreed
• A follow-up email summarizing outcomes has to go to people who were not in the room

Workflow

1. Pin the metadata first: meeting name, date, attendees, apologies, and chair. If the source does not say who attended, ask — never guess names, and never promote a person who was merely mentioned into an attendee.
2. Read the entire source before writing a word. Topics resurface; a decision made at minute forty often reverses one from minute five. Organize by topic, never by timestamp.
3. Harvest decisions. A decision is a sentence someone could dispute later — "we ship the beta on the 14th", "pricing stays unchanged this quarter" — not a mood or a leaning. Number them.
4. Harvest actions as owner + verb + object + due date. If any of those four parts is missing from the source, write TBC in that slot rather than inventing it, and flag the gaps at the top.
5. Compress discussion to two or three sentences per topic: the question on the table, the main positions taken, and how it resolved — or an explicit note that it did not.
6. Park open questions and deferred items in their own section so they survive into the next agenda instead of dissolving.
7. Run a names-and-numbers pass: every name spelled one way throughout, every figure copied exactly from the source, no rounded paraphrases.
8. Deliver in the template below unless the user supplies a house format.

Output format

# Minutes — <meeting name>, <date>

Attendees: <names> | Apologies: <names> | Chair: <name>

## Decisions
- D1. <decision, with enough context to stand alone>
- D2. <...>

## Actions
| #  | Owner  | Action          | Due    |
|----|--------|-----------------|--------|
| A1 | <name> | <verb + object> | <date> |

## Discussion
### <Topic>
<Two or three sentences: question, positions, resolution.>

## Open questions
- <item carried to the next meeting, with who raised it>

Handling messy sources

• Crosstalk and half-sentences: capture the resolution, not the noise. If a passage is genuinely ambiguous, quote it verbatim under open questions and ask rather than interpret.
• Two speakers sharing a first name: switch to full names or initials, consistently, everywhere.
• Jargon and acronyms: expand on first use whenever the audience includes anyone outside the room.
• A transcript with no clear ending: state where the record stops so silence is not read as agreement.

Quality bar

• Every action has a single named owner. "The team" is not an owner and never appears in the table.
• Decisions are numbered so future meetings can cite D3 instead of relitigating it.
• Nothing in the summary would make a participant say "that is not what I said."
• Disagreement is reported, never adjudicated — minutes have no opinion.
• An absent attendee gets everything they need in under two minutes of reading.