The Report Sous-Chef

Somewhere in your week there's a report. Weekly status, team update, the "what did you do" mail to your manager — different names, same shape: assembling things you already know into a format someone else wants. No thinking, all typing. It's the single most-automated chore in every AI course catalog on earth, and most of them get it wrong in the same way: they generate the report from nothing, and you get confident fluff.

A real sous-chef doesn't invent the menu — they prep from what's actually in the kitchen. So today has two parts, and the first one is the secret: before the report can draft itself, your week needs to leave a paper trail.

What you'll plate today

A work journal that takes ten seconds a day to feed, and a sous-chef that turns it into your report's format — a draft that's 90% done and 0% invented.

Ingredients

• Your prep-station kitchen
• One real report you send regularly — copy its last edition into the folder as report-example.txt
• About 30 minutes today, ten seconds a day after

Cook

1. Install the paper trail

The journal is a text file and a habit:

Create journal.md with today's date as a heading. Then add a rule
to CLAUDE.md: whenever I say "log: [anything]", append it under
today's date in journal.md, timestamped, and say nothing back but
"logged." Keep entries exactly as I said them — no rewriting.

Try it now — log: set up the file butler, sorted 214 files — and feel how cheap it is. That cheapness is the design: a journal you'd polish is a journal you'll abandon. From now on, every time you finish anything at work, one throwaway line. (You already generate this exhaust anyway — sent mails, closed tickets, done meetings. The journal just catches it while it's warm.)

2. Teach the sous-chef your report's dialect

Every workplace report has a dialect — section names, tone, what gets bragged about, what gets buried:

Read report-example.txt — that's the report I actually send.
Describe its dialect back to me: sections, tone, level of detail,
what kind of items lead. Then write REPORT-STYLE.md capturing it.
I'll correct anything you misread.

Correct what it gets wrong — "we never mention hours, only outcomes" is exactly the kind of rule that lives in your head until this moment.

3. Cook the first draft

You've only got one day of journal so far, so feed it a real week from memory, once:

I'll dictate roughly what happened this week — put it in journal.md
under the right days as I go. [dictate 5-10 log lines]

Now: draft this week's report from journal.md, in the exact dialect
of REPORT-STYLE.md, into report-draft.md. Rules: use ONLY what's in
the journal — if a section has nothing, write "nothing this week"
rather than inventing. Flag anything you weren't sure how to phrase
with [CHECK].

Read the draft against your memory. The [CHECK] flags and the "nothing this week" honesty are the difference between a sous-chef and a bluffer — a report tool you have to fact-check line by line saves you nothing. Adjust with the loop you know: "the wins section leads with the wrong item — the butler rollout was the big one."

4. Make it a standing order

Create a skill called "report": draft the current period's report
from journal.md in REPORT-STYLE.md's dialect, only from journal
facts, [CHECK]-flag anything uncertain, save to report-draft.md,
and remind me it's a DRAFT for my eyes before sending. Then save
point "the sous-chef", and mark the chore done in CHORES.md.

Note what stays yours: the send button. The sous-chef preps, the chef plates, and nothing leaves the kitchen with your name on it that you haven't tasted. That rule never relaxes, in this course or after it.

When it burns

• The draft reads like a press release — your style file is too polite. Add the honest register to REPORT-STYLE.md: "flat declarative sentences, no adjectives, never 'excited to share.'"
• You keep forgetting to log — attach the habit to something that already happens: last act before lunch, or first act after standup. One line. If a whole day slips, dictate it next morning — warm beats perfect, but cold beats never.
• It invented an item anyway — treat it like the serious failure it is: "Which journal line supports the second bullet? If none, remove it and re-read the only-from-journal rule." Trust is the product here; rebuild it immediately.
• Your report needs numbers from a spreadsheet — that's Lesson 7's station. For now a log: line with the number does the job.
• "Can it just email the report automatically?" — it could, and we won't. Re-read the last paragraph of step 4. Your name, your send button.

Order up

□ journal.md exists and "log:" costs you ten seconds
□ REPORT-STYLE.md captures your report's real dialect
□ A draft built ONLY from journal facts, honest gaps included
□ The "report" skill runs on one order — and you keep the send button
□ CHORES.md: second chore DONE

Next up — Lesson 04: The Inbox Line Cook. The chore with the worst reputation of all. We won't hook the agent into your live inbox — we'll do something safer and almost as powerful, with a privacy seatbelt on.

Stuck on a step? Question box below.