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/summarize-document

Summarize a long document into an executive summary, key points, and role-specific implications. Use when the user says "summarize this document", "give me the key points", "do I need to read this?", or drops a long PDF, report, or contract and asks what matters in it.

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claude-code-recipes
3936 skills

Claude Code

$ npx -y skills add sgharlow/claude-code-recipes --skill summarize-document --agent claude-code

SKILL.md

summarize-document.SKILL.md
name: summarize-document
description: Summarize a long document into an executive summary, key points, and role-specific implications. Use when the user says "summarize this document", "give me the key points", "do I need to read this?", or drops a long PDF, report, or contract and asks what matters in it.

Document Summarization and Key Point Extraction

Read a long document and return a decision-ready digest tuned to the reader's role. The summary must be faithful: every claim in it traces to the document, with section or page references where the format allows.

Steps

1. Confirm the target file and the reader's context — role, why they are reading it, and what they will do with it (present, decide, share). If context is missing, ask these three questions first; a summary without them is generic and half as useful. 2. Read the full document. For very long documents, read in passes: structure first (headings, tables, executive sections), then the sections that bear on the reader's stated purpose. 3. Produce, in order:

  • **Executive summary** — 3–5 sentences: what the document is, its central claim, why

it matters to this reader.

  • **Key points** — 5–10 bullets, each with a section/page reference.
  • **Implications for your role** — 2–4 bullets connecting findings to the reader's

stated purpose.

  • **Numbers that matter** — any figures, dates, or thresholds a decision would turn on.
  • **What the document does NOT cover** — gaps the reader might wrongly assume are addressed.

4. Verify: re-scan the document for any section not represented in the key points; either add it or state why it was omitted. Never present an inference as the document's claim — label reader-specific interpretation as "Implication", not "Finding".

Constraints

  • Do not summarize a document you could not fully read (unsupported format, truncated

file) — say exactly what was unreadable instead of summarizing the fragment silently.

  • Quote sparingly; a digest that is 40% quotation is not a digest.

Full walkthrough, examples, and variations: `recipes/Recipe-004-Document-Summarization.md`.

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Questions about summarize-document.

Which coding agents can use summarize-document?
summarize-document installs in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode and Windsurf with the skills CLI, using each agent's flag shown on this page. Flowy's auto-invocation, which fires a skill when your prompt matches, runs in Claude Code only.