silverstein/minutes/minutes-search

/minutes-search

Find information across all meeting transcripts and voice memos.

Usage

# Basic search
minutes search "pricing strategy"
 
# Filter to just voice memos
minutes search "onboarding idea" -t memo
 
# Filter to just meetings
minutes search "sprint planning" -t meeting
 
# Date filter + limit
minutes search "API redesign" --since 2026-03-01 --limit 5

Flags

Output

Returns JSON to stdout with an array of matches. Each result includes:

• title — Meeting or memo title
• date — When it was recorded
• content_type — "meeting" or "memo"
• snippet — The line containing the match
• path — Full path to the markdown file

Human-readable output goes to stderr. A result path is only a hint. To read the full transcript, run minutes get "<exact path>" --json, require exit status 0, and use only that response. Never pass the path to cat or the host Read tool.

How search works

Search is case-insensitive and matches against both the transcript body and the YAML frontmatter title. It walks all .md files in ~/meetings/ (including the memos/ subfolder).

For richer semantic search, users can configure QMD as the search engine in ~/.config/minutes/config.toml:

[search]
engine = "qmd"
qmd_collection = "meetings"

Search coaching

When the user's search query is vague or too broad, push back before running it:

• "who said X" or "what did Alex say" → If the meeting has speaker_map in frontmatter, use it to identify who said what. speaker_map maps SPEAKER_X labels to real names. High confidence = reliable, Medium = "likely" (suggest minutes confirm to lock it in).
• "everything" or "all meetings" → "That'll return hundreds of results. What specifically are you looking for? A person, a topic, or a decision?"
• Single common word like "meeting" or "project" → "That's too broad. Can you narrow it — a person's name, a specific topic, or a date range?"
• "that meeting" or "the one where" → "Help me narrow it down. Do you remember who was in the meeting, roughly when it was, or a specific thing that was said?"

Suggest search strategies based on what the user is looking for:

• Finding a person's input → Search their name: minutes search "Alex"
• Finding a decision → Search decision keywords: minutes search "decided" or minutes search "agreed"
• Finding an idea → Search voice memos: minutes search "idea" -t memo
• Finding something from a time range → Use --since: minutes search "pricing" --since 2026-03-01

Tips for good searches

• Search for what people said, not document titles: "we should postpone the launch" not "launch delay meeting"
• Search for names to find the policy-authorized normal history involving someone: "Alex" or "Case"
• Search for decisions: "decided", "agreed", "committed to"
• Reauthorize a selected result with minutes get "<exact path>" --json before loading full context

Gotchas

• Search is substring, not fuzzy — "price" matches "pricing" and "price", but "prcing" (typo) matches nothing. Try multiple terms if you're not sure of the exact wording.
• `--since` requires ISO date format — Use 2026-03-01, not "last week" or "March 1st". For relative dates, compute the ISO date first: date -v-7d +%Y-%m-%d.
• Large result sets flood stdout — Always use --limit when searching broad terms. The default limit is 10, but common words can match hundreds of files.
• QMD semantic search requires separate setup — If config.toml sets engine = "qmd" but the QMD collection isn't indexed, search will fail silently. Run qmd update && qmd embed first.
• Voice memos vs meetings — Both are searched by default. Use -t memo or -t meeting to narrow results. Voice memos live in ~/meetings/memos/, meetings in ~/meetings/.
• Empty results don't mean it wasn't discussed — If the meeting wasn't transcribed (e.g., recording was stopped before processing), it won't appear in search. Check minutes list to see what's been processed.