Use brief-intake

Turn raw mess

Turn raw mess — a Slack thread, meeting transcript, Jira ticket, half-written Notion page, email chain, or paragraph of free-form context — into a structured brief that the downstream skill (adr-generator, design-doc, runbook-generator, exec-summary, slide-outliner) can consume without further intake.

Reach for it when Use whenever the user has unstructured source material and is about to invoke another skilldrop skill, or when a draft is missing the load-bearing context the next step will need.

Install it

npx skilldrop-cli install brief-intake                 # Claude Code, your user folder
npx skilldrop-cli install brief-intake --project       # Claude Code, this repo
npx skilldrop-cli install brief-intake --ide cursor    # or kiro, codex, antigravity, copilot

It is part of the Core pack: --pack core installs it with its neighbours.

Ask for it

Say it the way you would to a colleague. Requests like these route to it:

• "Turn this Slack thread into a structured brief"
• "I have a messy transcript — get it into shape for the design-doc skill"
• "Structure this raw context into a brief before I run the next skill"
• "Take this half-written Notion page and extract a clean brief"

Requests like these belong to a different skill, so it shouldn't answer them:

• "Extract the decisions, owners, and due dates from this discussion"
• "Write the ADR itself from this context"
• "Critique this brief's quality"

If another skill answers instead, ask for this one by name: "use brief-intake".

Check what you get

A good result:

• Quote, don't paraphrase, when extracting. When a field is [explicit] or [implied], include a 5–15 word verbatim snippet from the source so the downstream skill (and the user) can verify nothing was hallucinated.
• Convert relative dates to absolute dates. "Next Friday", "EOQ", "the sprint after this one" all become YYYY-MM-DD with (implied) if you had to compute it. Today's date is in the system context — use it.
• Don't invent people. If the source says "someone from platform should…", the owner is unowned, not a guess.
• Don't merge across sources unless the user asked. If the user pastes a Slack thread and a doc, ask whether you should treat them as one brief or extract separately.
• Strip noise aggressively. Greetings, off-topic banter, "lol", and emoji reactions get dropped. The brief is the signal, not the conversation.

Use something else when

• When the user has already given a clean, structured brief — go straight to the downstream skill.
• For pure summarization — that's not what this is. The output is shaped for a specific next step, not a generic summary.
• For raw transcript cleanup. If the user wants meeting notes cleaned up, use decision-log.

Where a loop runs it

• Stage structure of the discover loop
• Stage intake of the ship-a-draft loop

Next

• SKILL.md, the instructions the agent reads
• Its page on the site
• Related: adr-generator, decision-log, design-doc, exec-summary, runbook-generator, slide-outliner

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