summarize

Summarize

A summary that drops the back half of a long document is worse than no summary — it looks complete and isn't. Everything here exists to stop that: pick the right style for what the content is, and never lose earlier material when the input is too long to read in one pass.

Procedure

1. Identify what you're summarizing before you pick a style. Read the first portion and classify it:

   • Transcript — speaker labels, timestamps, back-and-forth dialogue.
   • Email — From:/To:/Subject: headers, a greeting/sign-off, one author's voice.
   • Document / PDF / business content — reports, decks, specs; prose without dialogue structure. When it's genuinely ambiguous, say which you picked and why in one clause rather than silently guessing — the style below changes with it.

2. Get the full text. For an indexed document, index_document it first if it isn't already (list_indexed_documents to check), then either call summarize_document(file_path, summary_type) or dump_document first if you need the raw extracted text. For pasted text or a plain text file, read_file is enough.

   summary_type accepts only brief, detailed, or bullets — anything else comes back as an error, not a summary. The named styles below are how you shape the output: pick the closest of those three, then write to the style the user actually asked for. For "what were the action items", that means detailed (so nothing is dropped) and then writing the list yourself from the text.

3. Decide if it fits in one pass. If the content is short enough for you to read and reason over directly, write the summary yourself using the style instructions below — don't reach for the section-by-section tool path for a two-page memo. For anything long, use summarize_document (which already sections and folds internally) or the manual fold-forward procedure below when the tool isn't available for the content you have.

4. Write to the style, not a generic summary. Match the length and structure rules exactly — a "brief" that runs to eight sentences failed the request even if every sentence is accurate.

Styles

Transcripts and emails — conversational, outcome-focused:

Only brief, detailed and bullets are real summary_type values; the rest name a shape you write yourself.

Style	What to produce
brief / executive	2–3 sentences on the key outcomes and decisions.
detailed	Full paragraph coverage of every major topic and outcome.
participants	Simple list of who was involved, with role/title if known.
action_items	Simple list of what was assigned, and to whom if stated.
key_decisions	Simple list of concrete decisions and outcomes — not discussion.
topics_discussed	Simple list of the subjects covered.

Documents, PDFs, and business content — numbers before narrative:

Style	What to produce
brief	At most 3 sentences, no bullets, only the 2–3 essential takeaways. No filler ("Overall", "In summary").
detailed	250+ words. Extract every number, percentage, dollar amount, date, and metric. Name competitors, partners, customers, technologies. Full paragraphs, no bullets.
bullets	At most 3 bullets total, each under 20 words, one idea per bullet.
executive	At most 5 sentences. Priority order: (1) quantitative metrics, (2) financial data, (3) strategic outcomes, (4) competitive differentiators. Always keep the specific numbers. Board-ready tone, no bullets.

The rule underneath the table: for business documents, a metric always outranks the marketing language around it. "Revenue grew 40% YoY to $12M" is the sentence that survives a brief; "the company is scaling rapidly" is not.

Folding a long document forward (map-reduce)

summarize_document already does this internally when it's available — call it and you're done. Reach for the manual version only when you're working from pasted text or a file too large to read in one pass and the tool isn't an option:

1. Split the text into ordered chunks, breaking on paragraph boundaries where possible rather than mid-sentence.
2. Summarize the first chunk normally, in the target style.
3. For every chunk after that, summarize it against the running summary: given the summary so far and the new chunk, output only the facts in the new chunk that are not already captured — no restating, no rephrasing what came before, no transition filler like "Additionally". This is the whole point of folding forward instead of summarizing each chunk in isolation: isolated per-chunk summaries repeat themselves and drift from the style once concatenated; folding keeps one coherent summary that only grows by what's actually new.
4. Append each chunk's new-facts output to the running summary in order. The final running summary is the answer — do not re-summarize it again at the end, that just re-introduces the drift step 3 was avoiding.

Fork this

Swap the document table's priority order for a different domain (legal: obligations and deadlines before financial terms; incident review: root cause and impact before remediation steps) and the same fold-forward procedure carries a completely different kind of long input.