Natively for engineering teams
Engineering teams use Natively to keep the reasoning behind technical decisions: it transcribes design reviews, incident reviews and planning meetings on the engineer's own computer, draws diagrams on request, and turns the discussion into notes and action items. Those notes can go to Slack, Notion or a webhook, and a local MCP server lets Cursor or Claude Desktop read them.
By Evin JohnPublished 5 min read
Where engineering decisions go missing
The expensive part of an engineering meeting is rarely the decision itself. It is the context: why the team rejected the queue-based design, which alert fired first during the outage, what the on-call engineer tried before the rollback. Six months later, someone proposes the rejected design again, and nobody can remember the objection.
Design docs and postmortem templates help, but they get written after the meeting from memory, usually by whoever has the least time. A transcript with structured notes gives the author something accurate to start from, and a searchable history means the next person can ask what was decided instead of guessing.
How an engineering team uses Natively
- Design reviewWhile the author presents, screenshot the architecture diagram on screen and ask what happens when a dependency is down, or ask for the request path drawn as a diagram. Diagram drawing has no Pro gate; how good the result is depends on the model you use.
- Incident review or postmortemLet Natively transcribe the timeline as people reconstruct it. Afterwards, the notes give you the sequence of events and the action items as a starting draft, which the incident owner then corrects.
- Sprint planning and project syncsWith Pro, the Sprint Planning template writes sections for the previous sprint review, backlog prioritization, sprint goals and task assignment. Project Sync covers status, roadblocks, upcoming milestones and who owns what.
- Kickoffs and brainstormsProject Kick-Off records context, deliverables, timelines and ownership. Brainstorm records the problem, the themes, the specific ideas and the directions the team chose to explore.
- Getting action items outSend the notes to a Slack channel or a Notion page, or to a webhook or Zapier, which can create tasks in your tracker if you set that up yourself.
- Reading notes from your editorTurn on the local MCP server and Cursor or Claude Desktop can read your saved meetings. It is read-only and listens on your own machine, so you can ask your coding assistant what the design review decided about retries while you write the code.
Fictional example
- Engineer (to Natively)
- Based on the screenshot and the last ten minutes, draw the write path for the new billing events service and mark where we said we would add idempotency keys.
- Natively
- Draws a flow: API gateway, billing events service, outbox table, queue, ledger consumer. A note on the service says idempotency keys are checked before the outbox write, which is what Dana proposed earlier in the call. Underneath, it notes the question Sam raised and nobody settled: whether the ledger consumer also deduplicates.
- Engineer
- Add that open question to the action items with Sam as owner.
The diagram is a drawing of what was said, not a check that the design is correct. Treat it like a whiteboard photo that someone still has to review. If you prepare system design interviews as well, the system design guides use the same vocabulary.
Engineering meetings and the features that fit them
| Meeting | What to use | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Design review | Screenshots of diagrams plus questions; diagrams drawn in answers | Free |
| Incident review or postmortem | General-mode notes: summary, sections, action items | Free |
| Sprint planning | Sprint Planning note template | Pro |
| Weekly project check-in | Project Sync note template | Pro |
| New project or epic | Project Kick-Off note template | Pro |
| Technical brainstorm | Brainstorm note template | Pro |
| Daily standup | Stand-Up note template | Pro |
| Team meetings in general | Team Meet mode, a built-in mode with its own prompt and note format | Pro |
| "What did we decide about X?" | Ask across past meetings | Free |
| Notes into tools | Slack, Notion, webhooks, Zapier, local MCP server | Free |
The Pro templates and modes can be tried in the one-time 30-minute free trial. For the standup itself, including when notes are worth it at all, see daily standups.
Setting it up on an engineer's machine
- InstallmacOS 12 or later, or Windows 10 or 11 (x64). There is no Linux version.
- Pick transcriptionUse a speech-provider key your company approves, or an on-device model such as Whisper or Parakeet if meeting audio should not leave the machine.
- Pick the AI modelYour own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or another provider, a local model in Ollama, or the hosted Natively API. Pick one that reads images if you want to ask about screenshots.
- Connect Slack or NotionChoose the channel or page that should receive notes, or add a webhook URL.
- Turn on the MCP server if you want itIt is off by default. Once on, point Cursor or Claude Desktop at it to read meetings.
Teams with strict rules about source code and internal architecture in third-party AI services can keep transcription, answers, notes and search on the laptop. Local AI assistant explains that setup.
What Natively does not do
- No Jira, Linear or Asana sync. It will not create or update tickets by itself; a webhook or Zapier step you build can.
- Webhooks only fire while Natively is open on the computer that recorded the meeting.
- It does not record video or the shared screen. It sees the screen only when someone takes a screenshot.
- It does not review code or verify a design. Answers and diagrams are written by the model you configured and can be wrong.
- It does not run on Linux.
- In a meeting room where several engineers share one microphone, separating their voices depends on the speech provider (Deepgram, Soniox or the Natively API).
Questions people ask
Does Natively sync action items to Jira or Linear?
No. Natively has no Jira, Linear or Asana integration. Action items can go to a Slack channel, a Notion page, Zapier or any webhook, and a webhook step you build yourself can create tickets in your tracker.
Can Cursor or Claude Desktop read my meeting notes?
Yes. Natively includes a local, read-only MCP server that is off by default. Once you turn it on, tools such as Cursor or Claude Desktop on the same computer can read your saved meetings.
Can Natively draw architecture diagrams during a meeting?
Yes. Ask for a system design, a flow or a chart and Natively draws it inside the answer, and you can screenshot a diagram on screen and ask about it. This has no Pro gate, and the quality of the result depends on the AI model you use.
Where to go next
Natively captures the call audio on your own computer, so no bot joins the meeting. Notes, recaps and answers come from the transcript.
Facts on this page were last checked on . Product details come from the Natively app itself; if something here is out of date, tell us at hello@heynatively.com.
