Today's Agent Skill: Turn Any Document Into a Committed Action List
What It Does
You finish reading a 12-page vendor proposal, a policy update, or a project brief and you *know* there were things you're supposed to do — but they're buried in prose, split across sections, and half of them are implied rather than stated. So they quietly become next month's fire drill. This skill reads any document and hands back only the parts that require you to move.
How It Works
The agent parses the document into discrete claims, then classifies each one as informational, decision-required, or action-required — discarding the first category entirely. For every surviving item it extracts the actor, the deadline (explicit or inferred from context), the dependency, and the consequence of missing it, then flags anything where the owner is ambiguous. Ambiguity gets surfaced as a question rather than guessed at.
How to Deploy It
Drop the SKILL.md below into your agent's skills directory (`~/.claude/skills/doc-to-action/SKILL.md` for Claude Code, or the equivalent skills path for your runtime) and it activates on phrases like "what do I need to do with this" or a pasted document plus an action request. No configuration or API keys — it operates purely on text you provide.
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
# Document-to-Action Extractor
## Description
Converts any prose document — proposals, contracts, policy updates, meeting notes, project briefs, long email threads — into a deduplicated list of committed actions with owners, deadlines, and dependencies. Discards informational content. Surfaces ambiguity as explicit questions instead of resolving it silently.
## Trigger
Activate when the user:
- Pastes or links a document and asks what they need to do with it
- Says "pull the action items out of this", "what's my part here", "what am I on the hook for"
- Shares a long document and asks for next steps
- Asks whether a document contains obligations, deadlines, or commitments
Also activate when a document is provided with no explicit ask but contains deadline or obligation language ("must", "by [date]", "is responsible for", "required to").
## Input
- **Required:** document text, file path, or URL
- **Optional:** the user's name or role (sharpens owner attribution)
- **Optional:** a date anchor for resolving relative deadlines ("within 30 days")
If no document is supplied, ask for it once. Do not proceed on a summary of the document — work from the source text.
## Steps
1. **ReadCopy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.