How to Turn a Client Brief into a Concept Narrative with Claude

TL;DR: Paste the raw brief into Claude with a structured extraction prompt, review the extracted constraints table, then run a second prompt that drafts the narrative in your own voice. The whole loop takes about 20 minutes for a typical residential brief.

Most client briefs arrive as a mix of emails, meeting notes, and half-finished wish lists. The workflow below turns that raw material into a concept narrative you can actually present — without the model inventing requirements you never received.

What you need

• A plain-text dump of everything the client has sent (emails, notes, survey answers).
• Claude (Sonnet or Opus), ChatGPT works too with minor prompt edits.
• 20–30 minutes.

Step 1: Extract constraints into a table

Paste the dump after this prompt:

You are assisting a licensed architect. From the client material below,
extract every requirement into a table with columns:
Requirement | Source quote | Type (hard constraint / preference / open question).
Do not invent requirements. If something is ambiguous, put it under
"open question" with a note on what to ask the client.

CLIENT MATERIAL:
[paste here]

Step 2: Review the extraction

Check the table against the original material before going further. In our test runs, roughly one row in ten needed correction — usually a preference misclassified as a hard constraint.

Step 3: Draft the narrative

Using only the validated requirements table below, draft a 400-word
concept narrative for the client. Structure: site response, spatial
organization, materiality, one paragraph on open questions.
Tone: direct, professional, no marketing language.

TABLE:
[paste validated table]

Edit the result — the model’s structure is usually sound, but the phrasing needs your voice.

FAQ

Can I skip the extraction step and ask for the narrative directly?

You can, but error rates roughly triple in our tests. The intermediate table is what lets you catch invented requirements before they reach the client.

Does this work with confidential client material?

Check your jurisdiction’s confidentiality rules and your client contract first. At minimum, strip names, addresses, and financial details before pasting anything into a hosted model.

Which model should I use?

Any current frontier model handles this workflow. Claude produced the fewest hallucinated requirements in our October 2026 test; see the table above.