People for the Human. Machines for the Mechanical.

In a coaching session I do four things at once. I listen. I think about the next question. I take notes. And somewhere in the background I am already drawing conclusions about what I just heard.

The notes always lose. They are written fast, half in my words and half in my coachee's, and the structure exists only in my head. Who said this, my coachee or me? Was that a decision or just an idea? What did we agree to try last time? After the session I spend a long time turning my notes back into something I can use.

The Tools Kept Getting in the Way

Over the years I have tried general-purpose documents, note-taking apps and dedicated coaching platforms. Every time, I ended up depending on someone else's tool: its structure, its pricing, its export, its idea of what a coaching session should look like.

The structured tools wanted forms and fields I had to click through while someone was telling me something important. My notes lived in their database, hard to move and hard to share with the person they are actually about. When I went back to a plain Markdown editor, I had my notes back, but I lost the context. A page of bullet points does not tell you who said what, what was a decision and what was just an idea, or which experiment we agreed on three sessions ago.

Either structure that locks you in, or freedom that loses the meaning. I wanted neither.

I did not want another tool. I wanted a format that keeps the context inside the notes themselves, that I can adapt to how I coach, that works in whatever editor is in front of me, and that is still readable in ten years.

So I Wrote One Down

It started on a weekend. Coachdown is plain Markdown with a handful of optional markers. You keep writing the way you always do, and you only mark what would otherwise be unclear later:

## 2026-03-10 · Session 4

- What made that possible?
  - ! "I let the team decide the opening hours, and they were right"
- J: That is the first decision you describe without checking it twice
- = the shift leads plan the April schedule
- [ ] Ask both shift leads what they would change next

An unmarked line belongs to the coachee. A question belongs to the coach. J: marks the coach's own words, ! an insight, = a decision, and a checkbox an experiment. Indentation shows what answers what. Each new session goes on top of one rolling log per coachee.

Flexible by Design

• Any editor. Obsidian, VS Code, Google Docs or a plain text file. Existing Markdown notes are already valid Coachdown.
• Your own structure. Use standard sections like Since last time, Review, Decisions and Experiments, or invent your own. Sections can change who speaks by default, so you type even less.
• Your language. English and German section names are recognised, and more can be added.
• No required AI. The notes are useful on their own. If you want analysis, the structure makes it possible, including with models that run locally on your own computer.

People for the Human, Machines for the Mechanical

I love working with AI. But coaching is the essence of one human being fully present for another, and that is exactly what AI cannot replace. I believe coaching has a future precisely because of that.

What technology can do is take the mechanical work off our hands: writing things down, sorting them, summarising, remembering what was agreed three months ago, preparing the next review. These are the dull, repetitive processes around every session. If machines handle them, the coach gets back what matters most: time and attention for the person in front of them.

Coachdown is my small contribution to that. An open, shared language between coaches, coachees and the tools that support them, so that technology serves the conversation and not the other way round.

Beyond My Own Notes

I built Coachdown to lower the load on the coach, during the session and after it. A shared format does more than that.

• The notes belong to both people in the room. The coachee can read them, correct them and take them along.
• Privacy-friendly analysis becomes possible. Structure and content are separate, so a tool can look at patterns without reading what was said.
• Growth can become visible. With a few sessions in the same format, coach and coachee can look for what’s invisible from inside a single session: who draws the conclusions, which themes fade, which patterns the coachee now names on their own.

How Do You Take Your Notes?

Coachdown grew out of my coaching experience, and it only gets good if coaches who work differently than I do shape it with me. So I would love to hear from you:

• Do you recognise this dilemma between rigid tools and notes without context?
• How do you record your coaching sessions today, and what happens to the notes afterwards?
• What would a format need to handle for the way you coach?

Coachdown is open source, and I want to build it in the open. Try it in one session and tell me where it got in your way. Share an edge case, add the section names of your language, or build a tool on top of it. Every coach who joins makes it a little more likely that the next generation of coaching tools gives us more time with people, not less.

— Sebastian · cto.berlin · changelog