Owner, Task, Deadline

reliable three-field extraction

Part of: Meeting Notes to Action Items

One clean sentence is easy. Real transcripts aren't clean. Somebody says "we should update the wiki" with no owner. Somebody says "Priya, can you review the PR?" with no deadline. If your extractor assumes every item has all three fields, it breaks the first time reality shows up. This lesson makes the three-field extraction hold up: always three fields, even when the transcript only gives you one or two. Prompt for the missing case explicitly The model won't guess your convention unless you tell it. If you don't say what to do about a missing owner, it might invent one, drop the item, or leave the field blank inconsistently. Pin it down: The "never invent" line matters. Models are eager to be helpful and will happily assign a random due date to look complete. Telling it to leave the field empty is what keeps your data honest. Fill defaults in code, not the prompt You want empty fields to become readable labels like "Unassigned" and "No deadline", but that's a display decision, so do it in Python, not the prompt. Keep the model's job narrow (extract what was said) and let your code apply presentation rules: The x or default idiom is the workhorse here: an empty string is falsy, so

Challenge: Default the Missing Fields