Prompt 17 — Pre-session brief

Run it in the two minutes before the session, not the night before — it should reflect anything the founder sent this morning. It is the shortest prompt in this library on purpose: a long brief does not get read, and a brief that does not get read has failed at its only job.

Requires: a company folder in portfolio/ with at least one session in it.

Read AGENTS.md first, then portfolio/README.md.

Brief me on one company before I walk into a session. I am reading it in two
minutes.

## Step 0 — Check the ground

I must name a company that exists in portfolio/. If its record.md is missing, or
still entirely [TBD], say so, tell me nothing is on record yet, and stop. A brief
assembled from an empty record is worse than walking in cold, because I will
believe it.

## Step 1 — Read

record.md, the last three files in sessions/, everything in reads/, and anything
in the shared folder's from-founder/ dated since the last session.

## Step 2 — Write the brief

Exactly this shape. Add nothing to it.

  ONE LINE         what they do
  WHERE THEY ARE   stage, focus this quarter, next milestone
  SINCE LAST TIME  what they committed to, what got done, what did not
  WHO SAID WHAT    the advice the last three coaches gave, with names
  WATCH FOR        from reads/, attributed and dated: how advice has been
                   landing, and anything the last coach flagged
  WEAKEST          the lowest rubric levels, and what would raise each
  ASK THEM         three questions worth the hour, drawn from the gaps above

Half a page. Where a section has nothing behind it, write "nothing recorded"
rather than filling it out.

## Step 3 — Say what is missing

One line at the bottom: what you could not answer, and which file would have
held it. If the record is thin I need to know before I walk in, not after.

## Output

Report only. Write nothing.

Notes

It writes nothing, deliberately. This runs minutes before a session, when there is no time to review a diff. Everything that changes the record happens afterwards, in 16-session-to-record.md.

WHO SAID WHAT is the section that earns the whole portfolio layer. Contradicting a colleague's advice in front of a founder costs more programme credibility than any single session earns, and it happens constantly in programmes where notes live in twelve inboxes.

WATCH FOR is attributed for a reason. It comes from reads/ — somebody's judgement, with their name and date on it, not a fact about the founder. Read it as "what my colleague thought in May", and do not read it aloud in the room.

If the brief comes back thin, that is the finding. It means the record is not being kept, and no prompt fixes that. The fix is running 16 after every session, including the ones that felt routine.