audit-transcription

# Audit transcription ## Posture Auto-transcribed text is noisy in domain-specific ways. The user almost always knows what they actually said; you don't. **Your job is to flag, not to correct.** Every interpretation is a hypothesis until the user confirms it. You will be wrong about some flags even when you're well-grounded in context. That's fine — it's expected. What's not fine is silently applying corrections the user hasn't seen. ## Workflow ### 1. Read the whole transcript before flagging anything You can't tell what's mangled until you know the topic and shape. Skim end-to-end first. ### 2. Pull in domain context the user has documented Before guessing at vocabulary, check what's actually in the user's world: - Project notes, AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md, glossaries - Related notes the transcript references - Recent commits, working logs, specs If a transcribed proper noun doesn't match anything in their documented vocabulary, **don't substitute a similar-sounding name from your own knowledge** — flag it and ask. ### 3. Triage into three confidence tiers | Tier | Example | What to do | |------|---------|------------| | **High — recurring vocabulary** | A phonetic mishearing of a domain term that appears throughout the transcript (e.g. a tool, product, or library name consistently rendered as a similar-sounding non-word) | Propose find/replace | | **Medium — sentence-level gist** | A garbled clause whose meaning is recoverable from context | Propose your interpretation **as a question**: "I think you were saying X here — does that match?" | | **Low — unrecoverable** | A sentence where multiple consecutive words are nonsense and the surrounding context doesn't pin down what was being said | Flag as garbled. Do not reconstruct. | ### 4. Surface flags as a list, not as edits Show the user the triage grouped by tier. Wait for their pass: - They will confirm some, correct others, and reject a few entirely. - Treat each correction as a context update — apply it across the rest of the transcript before continuing. - Don't argue. If the user says "that's not a word we use" about one of your guesses, drop it and don't relitigate. ### 5. Apply edits in-place only after confirmation For high-confidence vocabulary: inline find/replace. For medium/low-confidence stretches: wrap with a callout that preserves the original beneath the gist. ```markdown > [!warning] Transcription note (Garbled) > gist: <one-paragraph reconstruction of what was being discussed> <original garbled text left intact> ``` Never strip the raw transcript. The audit makes a noisy record readable; it doesn't replace it. ### 6. Annotate the file at the top After edits, add a `## Transcription notes` section above the transcript with: - A note that the transcript is auto-generated - The recurring-vocab glossary (so future readers and agents don't re-derive it) - Single-occurrence corrections that surprised you or that the user explicitly confirmed - A pointer to the callout format used for unrecoverable passages Update the frontmatter `description` to mention auto-transcription and the notes section. ## Anti-patterns - **Don't guess at proper nouns from your own knowledge.** A name that sounds plausible to you may be invented. Flag, ask. - **Don't rewrite garbled sentences with confident prose.** Even when you think you know what was said, write the gist as a hypothesis in a callout, not as edited dialogue. - **Don't batch corrections without showing the user first.** Auto-mode does not override "wait for user confirmation on interpretive judgments." - **Don't keep pushing a guess after the user corrects you.** The correction itself is information about how they think — incorporate it into how you flag the rest. - **Don't claim you've recovered something you haven't.** If a clause is gone, mark it `[transcription unintelligible]` rather than fabricating. ## When the user is the only source of truth If you can't ground a flag in any documented context — no glossary, no project notes, nothing in the codebase — say so explicitly when surfacing the flag. Frame it as "no idea what this is, and nothing in your notes resolves it" rather than producing a confident-sounding guess. The user will tell you, and that's the right division of labor.