How action briefs work

Every page you save is sent to Claude, which returns a structured action brief with four sections.

What is in a brief

• Summary: a short overview of what the content is about.
• Key insights: the points worth knowing.
• Action items: what you could actually do about it.
• Follow-ups: what to investigate next.

If a section has nothing worth listing, the brief says so instead of padding it out. You will see "No insights extracted", "No action items", or "No follow-ups".

How long it takes

Generation usually takes about 5 to 15 seconds. You do not have to wait on the page. The side panel and the dashboard both update on their own the moment the brief is ready, and the dashboard list shows "Generating action brief" until then.

What Skiml reads

Skiml briefs the text that was extracted and saved, not the live page. Very long saves are truncated to the first 30,000 characters before they are sent for briefing, so the brief reflects the opening of an extremely long document rather than all of it.

Skiml also classifies what kind of content it is, across categories such as technical articles, news digests, research papers, GitHub readmes, financial content, social threads, podcasts, and newsletters. The classification shapes how the brief is written, so a research paper and a marketing page do not come back in the same shape.

Regenerating a brief

Open the brief in the dashboard and use Regenerate brief. This is the fix for a brief that misfired or a save you cleaned up after the fact.

Regeneration is limited to 3 times per save per day. If you hit the ceiling, Skiml tells you that you have hit the daily regeneration limit.

When generation fails

A failed brief shows Brief generation failed with a Retry option. This happens most often on very short pages, on pages where extraction came back nearly empty, or when the model is temporarily overloaded. Retrying counts against the same daily regeneration limit of 3 per save.

If a page consistently fails, the usual cause is that there was too little text to work with. Open the save, paste better content into the body, and regenerate.

Reading and keeping briefs

Briefs open in a panel beside your library. You can copy a brief as Markdown, and Pro accounts can download it as a .md file. See search and export.