Source material

Source material is the raw evidence you saved, such as a transcript, email thread, document, or note, kept intact so any conclusion drawn from it can be traced and rechecked later.

Source material is the raw evidence you saved, such as a transcript, email thread, document, or note, kept intact so any conclusion drawn from it can be traced and rechecked later. The point is that summaries, decisions, and tasks all descend from something, and keeping the original preserves the chain back to it. Picture a one-hour call: the recording and its transcript are the source material, while the action list the assistant produces is a derived artifact. When a teammate later asks where a commitment came from, you tell the assistant to open the transcript at that moment and read back the exact words, so the claim stands on the evidence rather than on memory.

Builder example

If your assistant summarizes meetings or emails but discards the originals, every later answer becomes unverifiable. A summary can drop a caveat or invert a decision, and with nothing to check against, the error spreads into tasks and briefs. Tell the agent to store the raw transcript or thread alongside each summary and to link the two, so a reviewer can reopen the source and confirm any line before acting on it.

Common confusion: Source material is the unedited original, while an artifact is the reviewed output derived from it. A meeting summary is not source material; the transcript it was built from is. What makes something source material is that nothing downstream replaces the need to keep it.