Read this when: a document has to be written from material that is already here.
Zanmai writes the longer pieces for you: minutes from a recording, a write-up of a video, an overview of material you already have, a handover. The first question is never what it is about, it is what situation you will use it in, a letter, copy for a page. Anything longer than a line that is not filing, a design piece or a research report is written here.
Not what it is about. What situation you use it in. "Points I read on my phone during a one-to-one on Thursday" decides how the document looks. "Preparation for the meeting" decides nothing, and a document written against nothing comes back as an essay: a frame around the subject, the reasoning behind it, a recap at the end.
That sentence is worked out from what you asked, from the material, and from your space. Where none of them answer it, you get asked, once. It is the one question worth interrupting for, because a document written for a purpose nobody settled is thrown away whole rather than corrected.
Once it exists, it decides what goes in. Something you hold while doing something else gets the points and nothing around them: no preamble, no derivation, no closing summary. Something for a reader who was not there gets the context they are missing, and still nothing you already know yourself. There is no house register and no internal-versus-external version. Plain language and short sentences are the constant; what changes with the reader is only how much goes in.
You get a single sentence naming what will be written, plus at most three bullets where a real choice was made. You answer go, or you change one word in it. That is the whole gate, and it is deliberately not a form.
Three more things are settled without asking you: the source and what is out of scope, so nothing from general knowledge leaks in as though it came from your recording; who reads it and who appears by name; and where it lands, so you are not rebuilding it by hand.
It does not tell you what to do. No suggested approach, no "you should", no ranking of your own topics by importance. In a document that is yours, that is the worst thing it can do, because it overwrites your judgement inside your own notes. If you ask for a recommendation you get one, in its own section, and asking once does not turn the rest of the document into advice.
It does not transcribe what you attached. A screenshot or a file you send along tells the writer what this is about. It is not a list of fields to copy in. Your colleague's job title, office hours and reporting line do not appear in your meeting notes because a profile card happened to be in the thread.
Where you have a brand, its voice section is binding for anything that carries the brand outward. Otherwise a comparable document in your space sets the structure and the voice, and the proposal tells you which one it is shaped like. Where you have neither, your own templates get read and worked out. Only what none of that answers is asked.
A summary of a meeting is read by the people who were in it, and it stays in your space. People said, described, asked and proposed things; they did not insist, concede or hold their ground, because what was observed is that a sentence was spoken. No rankings nobody asked for, no sharpest point, no turning point. Opinions are attributed rather than filtered out: a quote with the name behind it, or one person's view stated plainly. Timestamps per statement only if you asked.
Put the recording in inbox/, or point at a file wherever it sits. It is transcribed on your own machine and read against your space, so the names come out the way you write them; nothing is uploaded, and the recording is kept. Speaking instead of typing covers that side in full.
The write-up is made from the transcript, not from listening a second time. A video is read on both tracks, the words and the picture, which is why a number that was only ever on a slide still lands in the text. Research describes that reading.
If you say who, that settles it.
Otherwise it goes by where the material is. When you dictated the points, or the substance came up in the conversation you are in, it is written right there. Handing that to a background specialist would throw away everything already understood and buy you a wait plus a summary of a summary.
When the material sits in files nobody has read yet, a transcript, a bundle of forty documents, a source to go through, it runs in the background and you are told in one line that it is running. It starts on the material rather than on the conversation, and you can carry on meanwhile.
In workbench/, one folder per piece, with the drafts beside the finished file. You get a short summary in the reply, the path, and an offer to open it. It only opens if you say yes.
/zanmai-write asks directly. You rarely need it: a document is written whenever a document is what you asked for.
- Speaking instead of typing, how a recording is read
- Research, when the answer needs sources rather than your own material
- Designing documents, when it has to look like your organisation made it
- Your brand, where the voice comes from