I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home

7/2/2026 at 2:47:22 AM

AI note takers are so funny to me. Like what are you gonna do with all those notes? Go home after a long day, draw a nice bath, and flick through some shitty AI summaries?

And it’s AI so you literally can’t 100% trust it which is like half the reason I take notes by hand (to keep an honest record).

by bix6

7/2/2026 at 2:52:20 AM

Tune out of the useless meeting and do something useful with your time. Read the 5 bullet point summary afterwards.

If it gets things wrong, oh well. Not much of value was lost.

This describes the vast majority of meetings held in the corporate world.

by phil21

7/2/2026 at 8:15:26 AM

That's not what the article is about. The author describes using AI Note takers in PRIVATE meetings :)

That's astonishing for me, first time I hear about such a practice

by rudolftheone

7/2/2026 at 5:32:30 AM

> what are you gonna do with all those notes?

Dump them in Obsidian with an LLM agent bolted on. This note may never be consciously re-read, but it will become silent part of the context for conversations with the agent in the future. It is _ridiculous_ how useful this approach is.

That pertains to work meetings, though. I would never bring a recorder to a coffee shop.

by bad_username

7/2/2026 at 1:14:53 PM

So useful how? Like what does this context actually end up doing for you?

by bix6

7/2/2026 at 5:35:18 PM

Sounds about the same idea as taking a low-res picture of a document and saving it as a low-quality jpeg in folder full of low quality jpegs and then expecting those images to be useful.

by cratermoon

7/2/2026 at 2:57:36 AM

I mean most of these tools pair the notes/transcript with a video recording of the call. It can be super helpful to search the summaries to find the right recording, and then click the line in the transcript to re-watch the meeting.

For work, this is strictly better than not recording the meeting, as it allows for much faster searching, and it is very rarely wrong about the high level topics of a convo. I almost always go "General AI summary search" -> Transcript -> recording when trying to remember a specific item from a call.

That being said the parent article is spot on and I can't imagine someone bringing a recording to a conversation they aren't being paid to have.

by sbysb

7/2/2026 at 2:42:46 AM

> I’ve adjusted to - and even embraced - the idea of AI note takers on every Zoom and Google Meet call, and they are indeed incredibly useful. Taking Granola’s output from a client meeting and dropping it into Poke to create all my tasks in ToDoist is a bloody useful workflow that shaves off a good deal of cognitive load.

What makes an in-person work meeting any different?

by htrp

7/2/2026 at 2:16:43 AM

This feels like people several layers deep into devoid of all normal interactions.

We've had this technology (minus the auto summary) for years. People don't like being interrogated. It's crazy. Or maybe I'm crazy and someone needs to explain how all of this happened, it can't be all tiktok..

by Avicebron

7/2/2026 at 2:47:24 AM

We had to issue a directive for an open attendance online board meeting I'm on. AI adjunct popped up unannounced, poses issues for formalisms like board minutes.

Aside from that I just think its rude. Ask permission not forgiveness. People talking to people is what a meeting is all about. If you need assistance there's a conversation to be had about why and on what terms.

by ggm

7/2/2026 at 1:59:02 AM

This is strictly a San Francisco tech problem. This isn’t happening to most people

by FromTheFirstIn

7/2/2026 at 2:53:55 AM

First thought was this sounds like a hyperlocal sf gripe

by blinkbat

7/2/2026 at 6:37:45 AM

You think people in Austin or Denver or Atlanta don't have the same Zoom app, with the same AI helper as the one they give to San Francisco people?

by fragmede

7/2/2026 at 2:00:12 PM

I think they have the same app, but they don’t use it like this. It seems like you’re confident this happens a lot- do you live in San Francisco?

by FromTheFirstIn

7/2/2026 at 2:00:23 AM

That you know of.

by cratermoon

7/2/2026 at 2:04:03 AM

You’re the poster- do you live in the bay?

by FromTheFirstIn

7/2/2026 at 5:38:28 PM

I do not. I live in fly-over country. I still see it happening.

by cratermoon

7/2/2026 at 2:49:37 AM

At work, yeah, fine I guess. Outside of work? No way. And I don't mind being called a Luddite, I know what I am.

by LennyHenrysNuts

7/2/2026 at 3:51:23 AM

I can understand and appreciate the hesitation. I must admit I've simply adjusted to the idea that anywhere that I am, outside of my house, I assume someone is potentially recording or transcribing at a minimum audio.

I'm frankly far more upset by the lack of privacy due to poor security from credit reporting agencies than I am of these notetakers.

by brianjking

7/2/2026 at 2:18:44 AM

Just wait till this is baked into glasses…

by JSR_FDED