{"slug": "meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions", "title": "Meeting Minutes Your Agent Writes in 3 Buckets: Decisions, Actions, Open Questions", "summary": "A developer published an MIT-licensed agent skill that turns raw meeting notes into minutes organized into three buckets — decisions, action items, and open questions — with a conclusion-first format capped at one-third the length of the source notes. The skill explicitly forbids inventing owners or dates, requiring gaps to be marked with placeholders like [unassigned] and [TBD], and runs a self-check on ownership and deadlines before output. It is one of five SKILL.md-based skills in the developer's agent-skills-en repository, alongside commit messages, code review, proofreading, and deep research.", "body_md": "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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nMinutes 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.\n\nThat means everything gets sorted into exactly three buckets:\n\nAnd the whole thing opens conclusion-first: at most 3 lines on what the meeting decided, before any detail.\n\nRaw 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.\n\nThe skill forbids that, explicitly:\n\n`[unassigned]`. If no deadline, mark `[TBD]`.`[to confirm]`.\nMarking 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.\n\nInput (raw notes excerpt):\n\n```\n...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...\n```\n\nOutput:\n\n```\n## Meeting minutes (example)\n\n**Bottom line**: Pilot a cache layer to speed up the login page; pricing strategy undecided, pending a session with Finance.\n\n### Decisions\n- Adopt a cache layer for login-page performance (pilot first, not a full rollout).\n\n### Action items\n- [ ] Maria: draft the caching proposal, due next Wednesday `[date to confirm]`\n- [ ] [unassigned]: schedule pricing discussion with Finance `[time TBD]`\n\n### Open questions\n- Pricing strategy: no decision reached; the action-item owner will book a dedicated session with Finance.\n```\n\nNotice 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.\n\n**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.\n\n**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.\n\nThis 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.\n\nRepo: [https://github.com/alapha888/agent-skills-en](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).\n\nIf 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/alapha888/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions-5c7b", "published_at": "2026-10-02 19:52:31+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-02 20:07:37.235943+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["GitHub", "agent-skills-en"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meeting-minutes-your-agent-writes-in-3-buckets-decisions-actions-open-questions.jsonld"}}