If you work in a town office
You already know the answer. You just have to find it again.
The minutes exist. The permit is in a folder. The number the grant report wants is somewhere in last year's submission. None of that is hard — it's just forty minutes, eleven times a week, forever.
A day in the life
Tuesday, in a town of two thousand.
Nothing here is a new process. It's the same day, with the searching taken out of it.
- 8:40
“Didn't we already decide this?” A council member forwards a complaint about a fence on Water Street. You search the address and get every mention across nine years of minutes, oldest first — including the 2019 variance everyone had forgotten. Two minutes, with the minutes attached to send back.
- 9:15
A resident wants “everything about the marina project” Instead of assembling a folder by hand, you send them the topic page. It collects every document and meeting that mentions it into one timeline, and it's public — so they can keep reading without coming back through you.
- 10:30
The quarterly grant report is due Friday You open it and the numeric fields are already proposed — volunteer hours summed from the evidence log, last quarter's figures carried forward, totals calculated. Every proposal is marked for your review and shows the entries behind it. Nothing is final until you accept it, and nothing is submitted by anyone but you.
- 11:05
The narrative section A draft paragraph appears with citations to the meetings and documents it drew on — so you're editing something with a paper trail rather than starting at a blank box at 4:50pm. If your town has turned AI drafting off, this section simply stays empty for you to write, and the sums still work.
- 1:20
A records request arrives Most of what it asks for is already published. You search once, send the links, and the request shrinks to the part that genuinely needs your time.
- 2:45
The new clerk starts Monday The part of the job that used to live only in your head — which board decided what, when, and why — is searchable. Institutional memory stops walking out of the door with whoever leaves.
- 4:30
Packet for Thursday's meeting Export the report and its evidence as one packet, with sources listed — ready to attach, without rebuilding it from six files.
How the reporting actually works
It proposes. You decide. Always.
Every value shows where it came from
A number traces to the evidence entries that produced it; a sentence traces to the documents behind it. A figure that can't be traced isn't offered.
A gap stays a gap
Where the record doesn't support a value, the field is left visibly empty and marked — never estimated, never interpolated from something similar. An invented number in a grant report is worse than a blank one.
Nothing is final until a person says so
Proposals are marked for review. You promote them one at a time, and anything you've already reviewed is never overwritten by a re-run.
Your material can stay off the AI entirely
A town can switch off AI drafting completely. The sums, carry-forward and calculated fields still work — most of the time saving — and nothing from your workspace is sent to a language model at all.
What it doesn't do. It does not file anything, sign anything, or talk to a grant portal. It does not decide whether you qualify. It assembles the evidence and drafts the wording, and then it stops — because the submission is yours, and the consequences of it are yours.
Getting started
Bring one report you already have to write.
The honest way to evaluate this is to take a report you filed last year, put it through, and see how much of it comes back with a source attached. If it saves you an afternoon, that's the whole case. If it doesn't, we'd rather find out on one report than after a contract.