Meeting Notes to Action Items with AI: Owners, Dates and Nothing Invented
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Meeting Notes to Action Items with AI: Owners, Dates and Nothing Invented

Turn messy meeting notes into a clean action tracker with a language model and no code: a line format a program can import, owner rules that leave unowned work visibly unassigned, real due dates from a calendar the model reads instead of computes, and a list of what is not an action, scored by what each mistake costs and confirmed on meetings the prompt has never seen.

Time
45 min
Checked steps
5
Level
Beginner
Setup
None
Read step 1

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Lab cockpit45 min · 5 stepsSession running
3 / 5 steps passingOnly real commitments · step 4 of 5
prompt.md▶ Run✓ Check
- "today": the meeting date. "tomorrow": the next day in the calendar.- A weekday ("Friday", "on Monday", "this Thursday", "next Tuesday"): the first day with that name  after the meeting in the calendar.- "next week" with no day: the Friday of the following week.- "end of the month": the last day of the meeting's month.- "in two weeks": the meeting date plus 14 days.- "by the 15th" or "on the 29th": that day of the meeting's month.- Work out a date from an event only if the notes give the event's date ("on the day" of an event on the 29th is the 29th).     
TerminalOutput

The job

After every Brightline Books meeting somebody types the action items into the tracker by hand, and things get lost: actions with no owner, "by Friday" never turned into a date, ideas logged as tasks. You write the prompt that does it for Priya, the operations manager. A harness runs it on real-looking meeting notes and prices every mistake in minutes of her time.

5 steps, each checked when you finish it

A check runs your work at the end of every step. Hints and the full solution are there if you get stuck.

  1. 1

    A line the tracker can read

    Priya runs Brightline Books' weekly meetings, and after each one somebody types the action items into the tracker by hand.

  2. 2

    Who owns it?

    An action without the right owner is how things get lost.

  3. 3

    When is it due?

    "By Friday" means nothing in a tracker three weeks later.

  4. 4

    Only real commitments

    Meetings are full of things that sound like actions and are not: "we could try a loyalty card", "parked until January", "Priya already sent the rota", "Harbour Press will send bookplates".

  5. 5

    Four meetings it has never seen

    Your prompt has been tuned on 8 meetings.

Step 1 as it appears in the lab

The lab’s own text. The hint and the solution stay inside the lab.

Step 1: A line the tracker can read

Priya runs Brightline Books' weekly meetings, and after each one somebody types the action items into the tracker by hand. It takes twenty minutes and things get lost: an action with no owner, a "by Friday" that nobody turned into a date. You will write the prompt that does it. There is no code: you edit prompt.md.

guidelines.md is Priya's house style. notes.jsonl has 8 real-looking meetings, each with the actions a careful person would list. The harness sends each meeting to a model with your prompt, reads the lines back and prices every mistake in minutes of Priya's time. A missed action costs 3, an invented one 2, a wrong owner 2 and a wrong date 1.

The tracker imports lines in one exact shape. Anything else it cannot read, and a line it cannot read counts as a mistake.

Do this:

  1. Replace the one-line prompt above ---NOTES---. Ask for exactly one line per action, in the form from guidelines.md, and nothing else: no headings, no bullets, no explanation.
  2. Click Run. python3 run_tests.py 2 shows the model's full reply for meeting 2.

The check needs at least 20 of the 26 actions found and no more than 2 unreadable lines.

prompt.md, the file you edit8 lines
<!-- prompt.md: your instructions go above ---NOTES---; the template for each meeting goes below it.
     The template can use {notes}, {date}, {weekday} and {calendar} (the next 45 days, one per line).
     Notes between these marks are removed before sending. -->
<!-- TODO (Step 1): ask for one line per action in the tracker's exact format (see guidelines.md),
     and nothing else. -->
List the action items from these meeting notes.
---NOTES---
{notes}
Provided for you:actions.pyguidelines.mdholdout.jsonlnotes.jsonlrun_tests.py

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to code for this lab?

No. You edit prompt.md, a plain text file, and click Run. A harness sends each meeting to a hosted model and scores the lines it writes.

Why give the model a calendar?

Small models are unreliable at date arithmetic. Given the next few weeks as a list of weekdays and dates, they look the date up instead of computing it, and wrong dates fall by more than half in the lab.

What counts as an action item?

Something a person or the team agreed to do. Ideas, parked items, things already done and promises from other companies are not; the lab scores an invented action as a mistake.

How is the prompt scored?

Against an answer key, with each mistake priced in minutes: a missed action 3, an invented one 2, a wrong owner 2, a wrong date 1.

Extracting action items from meeting notes, reliably

Pulling action items out of meeting notes is one of the most requested AI automations, and one of the easiest to get subtly wrong. Models skip owners, invent tasks from ideas that were parked, and turn "next Tuesday" into a date that is not a Tuesday. In this lab you write the extraction prompt without code and measure it against an answer key. You set a line format a tracker can import, write owner rules that mark unowned work as unassigned, give the model a calendar to read dates from, list what does not count as an action, and confirm the result on held-out meetings.