Afterword
Meeting notes you can trust the day after. A rebuild of Fathom built around the case the brief says matters most: an eight-person call that runs an hour.
The idea
Fathom is excellent at capture. After using it end to end (recon/), what I kept running into was the day after: nobody re-watches an hour, and the notes can't be checked against what was said. On a big call, people come back with three questions:
| Question | What Afterword does | What Fathom does |
|---|
| "What do I have to do?" | Action items with owner, due date and the exact moment, plus a cross-meeting inbox grouped by owner | Action items per call, no cross-meeting view (and "None detected" on my test call) |
| "Can I trust the summary?" | Every summary line, decision and action item cites the transcript moment. Hover to see the verbatim quote, click to hear it. Claims the model can't back with a quote are dropped. | Summary with no links back to the source |
| "Where did we talk about X?" | Hybrid keyword + semantic search returning moments (speaker + timestamp), and Ask with cited answers across all meetings | Search returns calls |
What I built, kept, changed and cut
Built
- Meeting workspace. It's laid out as a document with its sources: notes on the left; player, speaker map and transcript on the right. Fathom uses a narrow centre column and leaves ~40% of the screen empty.
- Speaker timeline: one lane per person, with chapter ticks and highlights. You can see who talked when on an 8-person call at a glance.
- Transcript: speaker and timestamp on every line (Fathom's bubbles show neither). It follows playback, clicking a line seeks, and it's virtualized, so a 70-minute meeting with 300+ lines scrolls smoothly.
- Templates: General, Standup, 1:1 and Sales. Each is generated on demand and cached by content hash.
- Dynamics: participation balance (normalized entropy of talk time), who cut in on whom, and monologues.
- Keyboard: Space/K, J/L, H highlight, / find. Ctrl+K opens the command palette everywhere.
- Clips. Drag across the timeline or shift-click transcript lines, then Share clip. The public page needs no sign-in and plays only that range.
- Real pipeline. Upload or record → Deepgram (diarized) → speaker naming → stats → grounded analysis → hybrid index. Pipeline progress is shown live.
- Live recording in the browser. Live captions, live action items and H highlights while you talk, then the same post-call pipeline.
- Workspace vocabulary. Team names and jargon are passed to the speech model. On the 8-person meeting this took speaker naming from 7/8 to 8/8 and fixed "Lena" being heard as "Lina".
Changed
- Library rows instead of identical thumbnails. Every meeting gets a fingerprint: who held the floor across the meeting, in 96 slices. A standup looks nothing like a 1:1.
- Templates cut from 15+ sales methodologies to 4.
- No "Awaiting Attendees" limbo (my main complaint in
recon/notes.txt): press record and words appear.
Cut, deliberately:
| Cut | Why |
|---|
| The bot that joins Zoom/Meet/Teams | The brief allows stubbing it. It's days of infrastructure work for no product insight, so the capture layer is browser recording + upload, feeding the same pipeline. |
| Calendar sync | It only exists to schedule the bot. |
| CRM, Deals, Alerts, Playlists, Refer, credits | Sales add-ons, not the core loop. |
| Sign-up | Reviewers get in with one click into a seeded demo workspace. |
Accounts and private workspaces
- Every visit starts at sign-in. Visitors without a session are redirected to
/login, which remembers where they were going.
- One-click demo account. "Try the demo account" signs a visitor into a shared, read-only account whose workspace is the Tidewater demo (six processed meetings). It needs no password or sign-up, so the live link still works for someone who isn't signed in as me. The demo account's password is an HMAC of a server-only secret: it's never stored, typed or shared, and the address is reserved so nobody can sign up as it.
- Real accounts (email + password, or Google) get a private workspace, created on first visit. Recording, upload, search, Ask and the action-item inbox are scoped to it. Tidewater is visible only to the demo account.
- What stays public: shared clip links (
/c/…), by design.
- How:
- Sessions: Supabase Auth sessions in httpOnly cookies.
proxy.ts refreshes them and redirects visitors without one.
- Authorization: checked on the server for every route and query via
lib/auth.ts. meetingAccess() returns none | read | write, and someone else's meeting is a 404.
- Database: every meeting has a
workspace_id (006_workspaces.sql). Search filters candidates by workspace in both retrieval arms before ranking.
- Closed a leak: the old anonymous Realtime read policies were dropped.
- Sign-up without email friction. Accounts are created server-side and confirmed immediately (Supabase's built-in mailer allows only a few emails an hour). The trade-off is that emails aren't verified.
- Google sign-in turns on by itself once the provider is enabled in Supabase: the login page reads
/auth/v1/settings.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
