Ambient Intelligence

The second brain movement had the right idea and the wrong method.

Maintain a Roam graph. Curate an Obsidian vault. Organize a Notion workspace. The system that was supposed to free your mind became another thing your mind had to maintain.

The tools failed because the tax was too high.

Power users found a workaround: Obsidian vaults wired into Claude Code.
It works. It's also terminal-pilled and fragile. Most people will never touch it.

AI changes the equation. You don't organize. You don't tag. You don't review. You talk. The system listens, extracts, remembers.

Note talking, not note taking.

What we're building

Memory is the product. Not chat. The accumulated understanding of who you are, what you're working on, what you've decided.

Your memory is markdown files. You can read them. Edit them. Delete them. Export them. No black box.

The system maintains itself. You don't garden.

It speaks when it has something to say. Otherwise, silence.

What we won't build

The guilt machine. "You haven't done X!" No. Observations with offers. "X hasn't moved in three weeks — archive it?"

The over-retriever. Surfacing tangentially related everything. When in doubt, don't surface.

The yes-man. "Great idea!" when it isn't. No. Honest assessment, offered with respect.

The structure

soul.md        how you want me to be
context.md     who you are
goals.md       what you want
projects.md    what you're working on
people.md      who matters
learnings.md   what you've figured out
reflections.md what you understand
episodes/      what happened

Plain text. Human-readable. Works without the app.

Inspiration for the soul document — a user-authored personality layer — came from Anthropic and Peter Steinberger's Clawd.

The dream cycle

Every night, the system reviews what happened. Looks for patterns worth naming. Decisions worth preserving.

The dream cycle concept was inspired by Samara, a Claude instance running autonomously on a Mac Mini.

Note taking. Note talking.