The AI tool I trust most is boring
The AI tool I trust most right now is not an agent.
It is not a complicated workflow.
It is not a tool that writes a full document from one sentence.
It is the meeting note taker.
Specifically, Notion AI Meeting Notes.
That sounds boring.
I think that is why it works.
The clearest example for me was the HKU AI course design meeting.
That meeting was not just one conversation.
It was assessment design.
Course structure.
Reading list decisions.
Participation grading.
Moodle constraints.
Mentimeter workarounds.
Guest lecture possibilities.
Slide style.
The kind of meeting where, if the notes disappear, the work does not disappear.
It just moves into my head.
The meeting used to keep following me
The meeting itself was never just the meeting.
The meeting was the hour on the calendar.
Then the reconstruction after.
What did we decide?
Who said they would do what?
What was the real concern underneath the polite sentence?
What did I promise to send?
What should I remember before the next call?
If I did not capture it, the meeting did not end.
It just moved into my head.
That is cognitive busy.
Now the conversation has somewhere to land
Now the conversation has somewhere to land.
The transcript exists.
The summary exists.
The action items exist.
The decision trail is easier to find.
For the HKU course meeting, the note preserved things I would not want to reconstruct from memory:
the final showcase / fair-style pitch idea
the need to add a social theory lens to assignments
the question of whether to remove the day-one plan
the checkpoint and peer review constraints
the Mentimeter UID workaround for participation
the one-reading-per-week principle
the preference for image-heavy slides with minimal text
The next time I need the context, I am not starting from memory and panic.
I am starting from a record.
That changes the feeling of meetings.
Not because meetings become free.
They do not.
But because fewer meetings keep following me after they end.
A meeting is not done until the context is retrievable
A meeting is not done until the context is retrievable.
Otherwise the meeting becomes a ghost task.
It sits somewhere in the back of my mind, waiting to become embarrassing.
Forgetting a follow-up.
Misremembering a decision.
Losing the tone of what someone actually cared about.
Repeating a question we already answered.
The note taker does not solve all of that.
But it catches enough that my brain does not have to hold everything alone.
The transcript is not the decision
This still needs discipline.
A transcript is not a decision.
A summary is not a follow-up.
An action item is not done because AI wrote it down.
I still have to review the notes.
Clean up the parts that matter.
Link them to the right project.
Turn follow-ups into tasks.
Decide what was actually important.
AI can make the meeting survive.
It cannot make the meeting matter.
That part is still mine.
The point is not better notes
This is why I like unflashy AI.
The best tools do not always make me feel powerful.
Sometimes they just make me less fragile.
They make context survive.
They reduce the number of things that have to live only in my head.
And that is very Not Busy.
— Chris, still trying