Insight personas

Built-in transformations that read a source the way you need - Professor teaches it, Critic stress-tests it, Debate argues both sides, Beginner's Guide starts from zero.

Transformations run a prompt against a source and save the result as an insight - a summary, an analysis, a reading of the material from a particular angle. Notebooker ships a set of personas so you don’t have to prompt-engineer the classics yourself, and you can add your own.

Run them from any source’s Insights panel.

The personas

Professor - teaches the content instead of summarizing it. Produces lecture notes: learning goals, concepts ordered from fundamentals up with one analogy each, the misconceptions you’re most likely to form, and exam-style questions (without answers) to check yourself.

Critic - a frank peer review, deliberately not polite. Names the weak and unsupported claims, what’s conspicuously missing, the strongest good-faith counterargument to the main thesis - and, for calibration, what genuinely holds up.

Debate - a debate brief on the source’s central thesis. Steelmans 3–4 arguments for and 3–4 against, writes each side’s best rebuttal, and names the crux the disagreement actually turns on.

Beginner’s Guide - re-explains the content for a smart reader with zero background: why it matters, the big picture with one everyday analogy, every piece of jargon defined, then the full story step by step.

The workhorses

Alongside the personas, the classic transformations are still there:

  • Dense Summary - a rich, compressed summary (applied to new sources by default).
  • Key Insights - the most surprising and useful ideas as tight bullets.
  • Analyze Paper - purpose, contribution, findings, implications, and limitations of a technical paper.
  • Reflections - questions the source should make you ask.
  • Table of Contents / Simple Summary - quick orientation.

Make your own

Every transformation is just a named prompt - duplicate one, edit the prompt, and it appears in your list next to the built-ins. If a persona is almost right (“Critic, but focused on statistical methods”), copying and tweaking it takes a minute.