First prose paragraph of body as row subtitle
Designing a CRM list view where each row needs a contextual subtitle but the schema does not have a dedicated description field.
A personal-CRM stored each persons frontmatter and free-form markdown body in the same file. List views were showing just name plus last-contacted timestamp — visually empty cards. Adding a description column to frontmatter would mean a schema migration and a UI to edit it. Instead, the first prose paragraph in the existing body (skip the leading H1 heading, stop at the first ## Log section, cap to ~140 chars) became a high-quality subtitle on every row for free. The same body content the user already writes for prose notes also enriches every list view by zero additional input. Cost: one extra detail-fetch per row in a bounded loop (top 5 reach-out plus top 10 new), parallelised, deduped — no new endpoint, no schema change, no extra UX work for users. Production output is now sentences like Partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on Consumer x Tech under every persons row.
When a CRM list row feels empty and you need a one-line subtitle, look for free-form prose already attached to the entity before adding a new schema field — body.first_paragraph is often pre-existing high-signal content that the user wrote because they wanted to remember it.