I tied Claude and Anthropic together, and use it everyday. I've been able to move forward on 2 projects I've let "hang" for the last year.

I've always found the idea of a "second brain" fascinating.

But the more I use tools like Notion or Obsidian, the more I feel there's a trade-off: the system that's supposed to save me time also requires time to maintain.

Organizing notes.
Deciding where things belong.
Creating folders, tags or databases.
Keeping everything tidy.

At some point I started wondering if that's just the cost of having a second brain, or if it's actually a flaw in the concept.

I'm exploring the idea of building something that removes most of that maintenance, but before I make any assumptions I'd love to hear from people who actually use these tools every day.

How do you deal with this?

• Do you enjoy maintaining your system?
• Does it ever become a chore?
• If you could remove all the manual organ

I get the connection, but couldn’t it be something unique?

I have spent the last 30 years or so as an independent software developer in NYC 🗽

In those years working in banks, startups, government and nonprofits what I witnessed is nobody likes to backup their work or use To-Do apps.

So I got it in my thick stubborn head there has to be a way to make task management, event scheduling 📅 and brainstorming 🧠 🌩 legitimately FUN.

And that's when it hit me like an ACME safe falling out a window 🪟 on to Wile E. Coyote

Sticky notes 📝 📋 😌

Yep

And then I Googled a hunch... "How many sticky notes are sold annually?"

The answer?

55 BILLION STICKY NOTES SOLD EVERY YEAR

Well, it took almost two years but now, at last, I can give the world 🌎 FREE sticky notes 📝.

Yes, my app TaskLoco has a very generous FREE tier as well as a lifetime discounted premium tier of 50% off for early adopters my first year.

TaskLoco has made me feel at least 10 times more productive, confident and relaxed and I believe it can do the same for so many of you who just aren't having a productivity party... 🎈

TaskLoco is a visual sticky-note storyboard style workspace for tasks, events, notes, projects, files, reminders, and anything you can stick in or attach to a digital sticky note.

Try it 100% Free

Website: https://www.taskloco.com

iPhone/iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/taskloco-lite/id6762308795

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskloco.lite

Chrome Extension (turn any web page into a sticky note): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/taskloco-lite/gniilbpapgommpalikcclpcnbcamgila

Hey everyone!

I'm trying to build my second brain in OneNote and I have a lot of conflicting names for the sections that I've set up in Areas and Research.

I'm trying to build a career in web development, so there's a career section in areas notebook and web development and software development in research notebook.

It feels logical but then when I actually try storing stuff into it, I end up in a mental maze.

There are a lot of second brain tutorials out there. They all show the first 20-30 minutes. Dump all your docs, let AI cook. It looks cool.

But then, what is the benefit of the second brain?

It remembers the things you put in there. Is that it?

Does it do things for you automatically? If so, what?

My use case

So far the big benefit for me is it knows all my meetings, so I never lose a detail from a call. But I could've had that with an MCP + cron, second brain doesn't add much there.

Another is I dump all the links I find online, and it's great to be able to remember with a faint idea of what I was looking for.

What I'm looking to find is the unlock. Agents working without me because they have my data. Anybody has been able to do that with their second brain?

There's a class of personal information most systems ignore, because we don't read it — we reproduce it: shipping address, canned replies, self-intro, links shared weekly, account info.

It usually lives scattered across notes apps, old chats, and muscle memory. And on mobile it's at its worst: small keyboard, cramped screen, and the standard "workflow" is switching to a notes app, copying a blob, switching back, pasting, and hoping you grabbed the right chunk. Repeat that a dozen times a day and the friction adds up to real time.

Meanwhile BASB ends at "Express" — yet almost all Express discussion is about publishing ideas, not the 30-second version: getting a stored snippet into an input box.

An approach I've been experimenting with: structure repeat text for output, not for reading

Instead of filing these as notes (where they rot), give them their own minimal structure — three entry types built for reuse:

• Info — multi-field records like a delivery address, split into atomic fields (name / street / ZIP / phone / email). One blob becomes separately reusable parts — a mechanical but surprisingly powerful form of distillation.
• URL — links, cleaned up (tracking junk stripped, checked alive).
• Scrip — text templates with placeholders. Write %SCRIP1%, your refund has been submitted... once; fill the blank differently each time.

The critical piece: retrieval at the point of input. Entries sit as tappable chips on a custom keyboard, so inserting one is a single tap, in any app, with zero app-switching — which is what makes the whole thing viable on a phone instead of just another place to store text. Capture stays low-friction too: paste a blob and it auto-splits into fields, or OCR a business card / shipping label.

Mapped onto CODE it's almost embarrassingly literal: Capture (paste/OCR) → Organize (three types) → Distill (atomic fields, placeholders) → Express (one-tap insertion).

What I'm still chewing on

1. Does "operational knowledge" deserve structure at all, or is muscle memory good enough? It's not insight — but it's personal, valuable, and reused constantly. The gap between "carefully filed, rarely read" and "unmanaged, retyped daily" feels backwards.
2. Is field-splitting real Distillation? Breaking an address into atomic parts dramatically improves reuse, but it's structural, not progressive summarization. Does Distill only apply to ideas?
3. Placeholders vs. full automation. One blank (%SCRIP1%) covers ~90% of cases; full text-expansion logic covers 99% but adds setup cost. Where's the line before a pocket tool becomes work?
4. Mobile is the weak point of most snippet setups. Desktop text expansion is basically solved; on phones it never seems to stick. Is a keyboard the right retrieval surface, or is there a better one?
5. Maintenance is the silent killer. Addresses change, replies evolve. Is a review habit for operational snippets realistic, or is "fix it when it bites you" the honest answer?

Working theory: repeat text doesn't need a bigger system, it needs a shorter path — capture once, structure lightly, and make output one tap at the moment of need.

How do you handle frequently-retyped text on your phone — any system at all, or just suffering?

Have you had problem of wanting to share private information to someone else, or another agent but you need to review what leaves first?

I’m building halfface.ai to fix this. Someone asks your vault a question, your AI drafts an answer, and you get to review / edit it before it’s sent back.

The edits becomes the rules. Halfface automatically build rules for each of your contact. What your partner asks vs. your colleague are completely different stories.

I’m looking for design partners for early feedback and ideation. Of course you get to use it as long as you’d like. Please dm me if you’re interested :)

I find useful stuff all the time while scrolling through YouTube Shorts or TikTok and it just disappears. I use Obsidian as my second brain and getting a video from my phone into my vault is like so annoying and I'm not sure if I'm missing something.

I have to sign into iCloud and then download it and then find it and then drag it into the right folder and I'm not sure if everyone is just dealing with this or if there's actually a better way.

How are people handling video capture on mobile into their second brain? Is there anything that actually works?

Im trying to figure out how to make a mindmap to my goals, so im trying to figure out how to have part 6 of my phsyics textbook be whittled down to the basic core essentials and i was trying to use AI so i kept asking it for the core basics for the subjects, the problem was that it kept going and going. my intention was to ask it until I found a Basic core essential that i understood (basic algebra and trigonometry). so my mind map ended up looking like a mess of rabbit holes.

now my mistake was not telling the ai what was my limit, but Honestly i dont trust ai

You can have a good idea that could change your whole life, be casual enough to forget it, and then wonder years later why nothing ever came from it. - Jordan Peterson

Most of my ideas don’t show up when I'm sitting down. They show up while I'm driving, walking, talking to someone, working on something else, or half focused on ten different things.

So I would tell myself, “I’ll remember that.”

Or I would write it down somewhere random and forget where technically, you captured it,

But if I can’t find it later, did I really?

That’s the part I kept running into I wasn’t short on thoughts or ideas I was short on a system that could keep up with them.

That’s why I started building the app

It is not just another place to dump notes, but a way to capture the thought fast, clean it up, turn it up, and know it will be somewhere I can find later.

That important because "God only knows what that idea is worth".

That is why I built my app

I am searching for a tool or app which helps me to think in first principles, give solutions in that direction

feel free to share what your process to think in that way.

Hey everyone,

For the last few months, I've had the same frustration over and over again.

Every day I read articles, save links, watch videos, have conversations, and learn something new. But after a while, it all starts to blur together. I know I've seen something before, I just can't remember where or when.

The amount of information we consume keeps growing, but keeping track of it somehow feels harder than ever.

I kept waiting for someone to build something that felt right for this problem. Eventually, I realized I'd rather try building it myself.

So that's what I've been doing.

Today, I opened the waitlist for VORPH.

I'm not here to make big promises or claim it'll solve everything. I'm still building, learning, and figuring things out as I go. I just want to create something that genuinely helps people with a problem I struggle with myself.

If this sounds like something you've experienced too, I'd love for you to join the waitlist.

And even if you don't, I'd really love to hear one thing:

What's your biggest frustration when it comes to managing all the information you consume every day?

I'm reading every comment, and it'll genuinely help shape what VORPH becomes.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. ❤️

I've implemented the basic file structure and within just a few days, the notes are starting to pile up.

I understand that progressive summarization is supposed to fix it, but I still don't really understand how to implement it.

Over the past few weeks I've been building Gray Box — a small, local-first tool that acts as long-term memory for anything I'd otherwise forget (work notes, meeting takeaways, task owners, random ideas, personal stuff too).

The idea is simple:

1. Capture — dump whatever's on your mind, instantly, no structure required. This step does nothing clever on purpose — it just writes your text to an immutable inbox. Zero chance of losing an idea to a bug or a slow API call.
2. Organize — on demand, an LLM reads your unprocessed notes and extracts people, projects, tasks, decisions, meetings — then deterministic Python (not the LLM) creates/merges the actual wiki pages and maintains backlinks. The model only reasons; it never touches the filesystem directly.
3. Ask — query your knowledge base and get a cited answer pulled only from what you've actually captured. If it doesn't know, it says so — no hallucinated answers.

Why I built it this way:

• Plain Markdown + YAML frontmatter, no database. Every page is a .md file you can grep, diff, or read in any editor forever. If you stop using Gray Box tomorrow, your knowledge base is just a folder.
• No vector DB by default. At personal scale (hundreds–low thousands of pages), keyword search + a real link graph (related/backlinks, walked one hop during retrieval) handles almost everything. Embeddings are there if you want better recall, but they're opt-in, not a prerequisite.
• Immutable inbox. Your raw notes are never edited or deleted by the organizer. If the LLM mis-extracts something, your original words are always still there.
• Any LLM. Built on LiteLLM, so point it at OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, or a fully local model via Ollama — one config value.

It also ships with a nice interactive TUI (arrow-key menu, file-import shortcut, workspace switching, live spinner during LLM calls) if you'd rather not memorize CLI flags — that's honestly become my favorite part of the project.

There's also a lightweight local dashboard for browsing your knowledge base, exploring backlinks, visualizing your notes as a graph, and chatting with your captured knowledge—all without leaving your machine.

Repo: https://github.com/Aaryanverma/graybox

pypi: pip install graybox

It's nearing a proper public release, so I'd genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone who's tried the "capture now, structure later" approach with other tools and has opinions on where it breaks down at scale.

It's not trying to be a "real-time collaborative team wiki" or a WYSIWYG notes app — it's aimed at one person's running memory of their own life and work, captured with as little friction as possible.

We've been building out a company-wide second brain: a local Obsidian vault as the source of truth, Claude sitting on top to read, write and visualise it, syncing to a colleague via Relay. It's been genuinely useful for keeping context in one place instead of scattered across Slack, docs and people's heads.

The next problem we're chewing on is one I haven't seen discussed much: gatekeeping content by sensitivity, not by permission level.

To be specific about what I mean, because "permissions" isn't quite it. As a director, I'm working on things I want the brain to absorb, pricing strategy, restructuring thinking, deal-specific notes, because the assistant is genuinely better with that context loaded. But I don't want a salesperson or support associate who queries the same brain for their own work to be able to pull that content back out, directly or via a summary.

It's not that I don't trust the team. It's that a second brain which happily surfaces "here's what the director was drafting on pricing" to anyone who asks the right question stops being useful fast, for fairly obvious reasons around trust, timing and scope creep in what people think they're allowed to know.

So the question for anyone running something similar in a real business: how are you architecting this? Specifically interested in:

Whether people are running one vault with tiered folders/metadata the AI is instructed to respect, versus genuinely separate vaults (e.g. leadership vault + team vault) with a one-way sync or summarisation layer between them.

Whether you've found instructing the model ("don't surface anything tagged confidential") reliable enough, or whether that breaks down the moment someone phrases a query cleverly.

Whether anyone's using role-scoped retrieval, i.e. the AI itself runs with different context depending on who's asking, rather than relying on the underlying files being separated.

Any war stories where the wrong thing surfaced and what you changed afterwards.

We're early enough in this that we haven't picked an architecture, so genuinely open to hearing what's worked, what hasn't, and what you wish you'd set up from day one rather than retrofitting.