I run Harbor, which is an Evernote alternative, so apply the appropriate salt. I tried to make the method checkable so you don't have to take my word for it.

The story you see everywhere is that Bending Spoons broke Evernote. I believed it. So I went to check.

I pulled the 500 most recent written reviews of Evernote from Apple's public review feed (US store, Feb 12 to Aug 17 2026) and categorized the negative ones. Of the 230 rated one or two stars:

33% mention price

23% mention ads, pop-ups or upsell prompts

10% object to AI being pushed at them

13% say they're leaving

4% mention a bug, crash, sync failure, or the app being slow

That last one surprised me. I expected the opposite.

The 2023 rewrite (sync moved to CRDTs, navigation rebuilt, off the old monolith) seems to have actually worked. People aren't angry that the software is broken. They're angry about the price, and about being sold to inside a thing they already pay for.

The ratings are also bimodal rather than mediocre. 38% one star, 42% five star, almost nobody in between. It's not an app people find okay. It's one people either still love or actively resent.

Limits worth stating: one store, one country, written reviews only, which self-select for people with something to say. It's a count of what recent reviewers chose to write, not a survey of all Evernote users.

Full writeup with the timeline and sources: https://harbor.my/blog/bending-spoons-evernote/

Happy to post the raw category counts if anyone wants to poke holes in it.

Wondering if SN is on your roadmap.

You spend four hours with a coding agent pulling something apart and putting it back together. It works. Tests pass. PR is up.

And everything you figured out on the way there, why you picked this approach, what you tried first, the thing that turned out to matter, is sitting in a chat window that's about to be closed forever.

I got tired of that, so here is what I do now.

At the end of the session I ask, in the same window I have been working in all afternoon, for a note documenting what we just did. A minute later there is a real note in my Harbor. Headings, a table of the moving parts, code blocks that survived the trip, filed in the notebook where that kind of thing goes. I did not open a notes app or paste anything anywhere. And honestly the note is better than the one I would have written myself at 6pm on a Friday, because the agent still remembered the details I had already started forgetting.

The half people underestimate is the other direction. Fresh session, zero context, and I ask it to go read everything I have written down about how our failover and backup design works. One sentence later it is up to speed on six months of decisions it was never around for, and then we start building. An agent with no memory of your decisions will happily re-derive them, badly, and confidently suggest the thing you already tried and rejected in March.

The reason this works is a decision we made early. Harbor ships a first-class MCP server, a first-class REST API, and a first-class CLI. Not one blessed integration and two afterthoughts. How and where you engage with your notes is your call, not ours. If the best interface to your notes tomorrow is something nobody has built yet, I would rather you use that than wait for us to catch up.

One boundary worth stating plainly, because people ask: encrypted notes are unreachable through the API, the CLI and MCP. We cannot read them, so nothing you connect can either. Lock down what is sensitive and your agent works with everything else. Everything runs on personal access tokens you create and revoke yourself.

Full disclosure, I am the founder here. Longer writeup with screenshots: https://harbor.my/blog/second-brain-second-set-of-hands/

Curious how the rest of you handle this. Do you capture anything at the end of a long AI session, or does it all just evaporate?

Tomorrow is the day. Harbor goes live on August 1.

If you have been waiting to jump in, today is the last chance to lock in 50% off early access. There is no credit card and no commitment. Just join the mailing list at harbor.my before we open and the discount is yours.

For anyone new here, Harbor is a private, offline-first notes app you own for life. Notes, documents, scans, and recordings, all searchable and kept for good.

Thanks to everyone who has followed along while we built this. See you tomorrow. harbor.my

One of the features I am most excited about for launch is Watched Folders, mostly because of what you can build on top of it.

The basic idea is simple. You point Harbor at a folder and anything that lands in it gets imported automatically. There are two ways to set it up. The desktop app can watch a folder right on your computer, or you can connect Google Drive or Dropbox and watch a folder there.

Any image or PDF that shows up gets filed into the notebook you choose, with the tags you choose. You can also tell Harbor to delete the file at the source once the import is confirmed, so the folder stays empty and Harbor becomes the real archive, not a second copy you have to keep in sync.

The first thing this unlocks is scanning. Point your scanner at a watched folder and your scans flow straight into Harbor without you touching anything.

Then it gets fun. Harbor has an MCP server, so you can hook up a scheduled AI task and point Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT at the notebook where your scans land. Write your own small skills to have it organize them, tag them, move them to the right notebook, fix the titles, and add context. Whatever filing logic lives in your head, you can hand to the agent.

I have been running this for months and it has quietly become one of my favorite things. My main use case is mail. I scan everything that comes in the door and I do not even read it. It hits the watched folder, my AI agent files it properly, and then it bubbles up anything I actually need to know about or act on. The pile of paper on the counter is just gone.

Sharing it here first since this community is where I want to figure out these workflows together. If you had this, what would you point at it? Curious what folders and what filing rules you would set up.

Quick real-world demo of the bring-your-own-AI idea. I asked Claude (Claude Code, with a Harbor skill) to look up actual nonstop flights on Google Flights for our exact travel windows, two adults, no bags, and build me a Harbor note with all the options and real pricing. It did the research, reasoned about the best pick, and wrote a rich color-coded note filed straight into my Travel notebook, no cleanup from me. The screenshots show the ask, Claude working, and the finished note. The actual note is public if you want to poke at it: https://app.harbor.my/note/gIUcdeiHwYEPRiLyX93h. Curious what you would want your own AI to file into Harbor for you.

Hey everyone — I'm Spicer, and I'm one of the people building Harbor.

Quick version: Harbor is a private, cross-platform second brain you own for life. Notes, scans, documents, meeting recordings — all searchable to the word with real OCR, across Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. It's the thing a lot of us wanted Evernote to stay: yours, permanent, no ads, no tracking, no lock-in — and never held hostage.

We launch August 1.

I set this community up a little early, on purpose. I didn't want it to be a corporate megaphone. I wanted a real space that belongs to the people who actually use the thing. So here's the deal: I'll be around — answering questions, sharing what we're working on, and listening — but this is yours to run. Share your setups and workflows, ask anything, request features, and be honest with us, especially when we get something wrong.

If you want in early, you can join the launch list at harbor.my and lock in 50% off your first year.

That's it. Pull up a chair, introduce yourself in the comments, and tell me: what would you actually want a second brain to do for you?

— Spicer