How do I capture ideas from freeform text?

Table of Contents

For the capture type contract and bucket lifecycle, see document types. For moving captures between buckets after they land in inbox/, see Product backlog.

Question

I have a block of unstructured notes — meeting notes, a brain-dump, a rough idea paragraph — and I want to turn it into one or more well-structured captures in inbox/ without manually editing each file. How?

Answer

Paste or type the freeform text directly into a message to the LLM (Claude Code) with the instruction: 

Capture the following notes: <paste text here>

The LLM will:

  1. Parse the text for distinct ideas and themes.
  2. For each idea, distil a concise title (5–10 words, imperative or noun phrase) and a one-sentence description.
  3. Call compass capture --note "..." for each idea, landing the file in doc/agile/product_backlog/inbox/. Add --commit to land each capture as its own conventional commit ([agile] Capture: <title>, note as body) covering just the capture file and the regenerated bucket indexes — anything else staged is untouched.
  4. Report the slug(s) created so you can find them immediately.

You do not need to structure the text first. The LLM handles splitting, de-duplication, and canonicalisation.

Example

Capture the following notes:

We should look at adding dark-mode support to the Qt UI — there have
been a few user requests.  Also the CSV export in the reporting view
is slow when there are more than 10k rows; worth investigating whether
streaming the write helps.  And someone mentioned wanting an audit log
for configuration changes so we can see who changed what and when.

The LLM would call compass capture three times — one per distinct idea — and report back three slugs such as: 

Created: doc/agile/product_backlog/inbox/dark_mode_support_qt_ui.org
Created: doc/agile/product_backlog/inbox/csv_export_performance_reporting.org
Created: doc/agile/product_backlog/inbox/audit_log_configuration_changes.org

After capturing

Each file lands in inbox/ (untriaged). At your next triage session:

  • Promote to next/ if it is an imminent candidate: compass capture file <slug> next
  • Park in deferred/ for long-horizon ideas: compass capture file <slug> deferred
  • Discard if not aligned: compass capture file <slug> discarded

Script

projects/ores.compass/compass.sh capture --note "..." — creates one capture file in inbox/ per call. The LLM drives it; no manual invocation is required for the bulk workflow.

Tested by

Manual: paste a paragraph of notes into Claude Code and verify the created files in inbox/.

See also

Emacs 29.1 (Org mode 9.6.6)