TL;DR
- Work happens in conversations — product decisions, requirements, scope. The problem is it stays trapped there.
- The "missing middle" isn't about note-taking. It's about extracting work that already happened.
- AI pulls out what you figured out and turns it into artifacts — PRDs, user stories, requirements.
- Zero-draft artifacts give you something to react to instead of recreating from memory.
- 95% of the work is already done in the conversation. You just need to extract it.
What I've Learned
The real work happens in conversations. You hash out a product idea, talk through requirements, make decisions in real-time. That's not a precursor to work — that is the work.
The problem is it stays trapped there.
What most people do: close the laptop, take a note that says "clean this up later," and then spend days recreating what they already figured out. That's not productivity — it's waste.
The shift: use AI to extract the work that already happened. Not summarize the meeting. Not transcribe the words. Pull out the decisions, requirements, and open questions — and turn them into artifacts that continue the momentum.
I treat the first output as a zero-draft. Then I pressure-test it: edge cases, assumptions, gaps. The AI surfaces what's missing. I make the calls. The grunt work is done. The thinking is preserved.
Once you start treating conversations as raw material for artifacts instead of something you have to recreate by hand, everything moves faster.
Tools & Resources
- Fireflies.ai — Meeting recording with MCP integration for AI access
- Claude Desktop — Extract project-specific content from transcripts
- Claude Code — Workflow automation for requirements
- claude-code-requirements-builder — Extracts user stories and finds requirement gaps
- Extraction prompt — "Find the parts about [project], pull out what we actually discussed — not just what was said, but what we meant"
- Zero-draft PRD workflow — Record → Extract relevant sections → Generate first-pass PRD → Pressure-test → Review and edit
Download the workflow: I packaged my post-meeting processing into a Claude Code skill you can install in minutes. Connects to Fireflies, extracts action items, creates GitHub issues, and generates EOS L10 summaries.