The starting brief
Our team needs a searchable library of research notes. People should be able to add sources, attach documents and find earlier work. An optional AI feature could suggest related notes with links back to the originals.
- People
- An internal research team
- Success
- A researcher finds earlier relevant work and can open its original source.
- Outside this first release
- Public publishing and automated external research
Requirements to review
- Create a note with a source link
- Attach a document to a note
- Search titles and note content
- Suggest related notes with source links
Decisions that shape the implementation
What makes a note trustworthy?
Capture the original source link, author or owner and enough context to tell a quotation from an interpretation. Decide how the library handles an unreachable source and corrections to an earlier note.
What is included in search?
Define whether search covers titles, note bodies, extracted attachment text or all three. Permission filtering must apply before results and snippets are returned, including when an attachment has been removed.
What may the AI suggest?
Keep generated connections distinct from cited facts. Decide what content can be sent to a model provider, the review required before publication and how the system behaves when a suggestion has no supporting source.
Acceptance tests worth writing
- A search result links to the saved note and its original source.
- A restricted note does not appear in another user’s results or AI suggestions.
- Removing a document removes its searchable excerpts according to the retention policy.
- An AI suggestion identifies supporting notes and is visibly different from the source material.
How to use this specification
Test retrieval with questions your researchers already ask, including cases where the answer is absent. Agree an access and retention policy before choosing an AI provider. The starting scope excludes public publishing and automated external research, keeping the first release focused on the team’s existing material.
Review the guided draft’s assumptions, requirements and open decisions with the people who will use the system. Record effort estimates only after an engineer has examined the scope. A downloaded brief is a starting document, not approval to build or deploy software.
Download the working files
The JSON file can be imported through Build Brief’s “Import project” control. Markdown works in document editors and Git repositories; CSV gives you a requirements matrix; the agent task includes an explicit review-first engineering handoff.
Template edition: 21 October 2026. Published by Leemer Group. Guided drafting runs without an AI request; all generated proposals remain marked for review.