LAB ENTRY / EX—004
Context Card
A one-screen brief assembled from a calendar title, recent notes, and unresolved decisions—no transcript warehouse required.
AI Utility
Jun 2026
The question
What is the smallest useful briefing an AI tool can prepare before a meeting?
The hypothesis
A deliberately constrained context window will produce a more useful briefing than an exhaustive summary.
What I built
A local-first prototype that selects five evidence-backed items and names what it could not verify.
What happened
Early cards are useful when the source material is recent; stale notes remain the central problem.
What worked
Explicit uncertainty keeps the brief honest and makes weak context easy to spot.
What failed
Automatic action-item extraction overstates implied commitments, so that feature is currently disabled.
What surprised me
One open question is often more valuable than three paragraphs of recap.
What I learned
Context quality is a selection problem before it is a generation problem.
What happens next
Add source-age weighting and test whether users should pin one essential fact manually.