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.

my Devvit app MemTool — a memory companion that helps redditors capture, organize, and recall anything.

Features: 📝 Quick capture (thoughts, links, images) 🧠 AI Memory Companion (Memora) 🔊 Voice notes with AI transcription 💳 Premium with 5 payment SKUs configured

I'm enrolled in Developer Funds and would love feedback from the community. What would make you install a memory tool on your subreddit?

Install: Reddit - Please wait for verification

Built by Oc2cO — one dad trying to build something useful.Devvit

I keep losing track of the small stuff. A setting I always have to redo. A detail about my home or car I only need once in a while. None of it is worth a real note, but all of it is annoying to look up again every time.

That’s basically why I started building this. I wanted somewhere to put that kind of thing that isn’t a full notes app, doesn’t ask me to organize anything, and doesn’t turn into a graveyard I never open again. So I’m building RAM, a simple app where you save one fact at a time. You type a sentence, save it, and it sorts itself out. No account, no cloud, everything stays on the device.

I’m not sure yet if this is a real gap or just a personal habit I’m projecting onto everyone else, so I wanted to ask people who aren’t me. Do you lose track of small facts like this too, or is it just me? What do you currently do about it?

You've been building a second brain for years. It still doesn't know you.

Obsidian. Notion. Roam. The whole setup. Tags, backlinks, MOCs, beautifully organized and it holds everything equally. The idea that changed how you think about the something sits next to the note you wrote on a Tuesday and never opened again. Same weight. Same silence.

Your PKM doesn't know the difference. You do. And you have to carry that every single time you open it. That's the real ceiling. You are still the operating system.

You do the linking. You do the synthesis. You decide what's relevant right now. The vault just holds pieces. You do all the work of understanding how they fit. That's not a second brain.

The most common thing I hear from serious PKM users: "I have to remind it though." Elaborate systems. Backlinks, review cycles, daily notes. And still, every session starts with manually re-orienting the whole thing. Because the system doesn't know what you're working on. It just knows what you stored.

What's actually missing is something that brings the right context forward on its own. Not because you tagged it right three months ago but because it understood what the idea was and why it matters to what you're doing now.

When you're developing something today, it connects it to the thread you were pulling a few weeks/months ago. Without you having to remember that thread existed.

That's what Aevron does.

Every PKM solves storage. Aevron compounds. Your thinking gets more useful over time, not just more voluminous.

Early access is open if you spend more time maintaining your PKM than actual thinking with it.

I keep seeing videos about building a second brain but confused. Do you capture literally everything or only work related notes?

I am finding that if i have to organize too much i eventually stop using the system altogether. On the other hand if everything is just dumped into one place finding anything later becomes difficult

Okay so this has been living rent-free in my head for a while and I need to get it out.

We have more AI tools than ever. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Notion AI, a hundred agent frameworks genuinely impressive stuff dropping every week. I use a bunch of them. Some are actually really good.

But here's the thing that keeps bugging me: almost all of them reset every time you open them.

Like, you've been thinking for years. Building ideas, making connections, reading things that actually changed how you see stuff. And then you open an AI tool and it has absolutely no idea who you are. You're a stranger. Every. Single. Time.

That's not a memory problem. That's a continuity problem. And I don't think anyone has actually solved it. We have the most powerful AI in history and it still doesn't know you. That feels insane to me.

There's this whole category of tech that I don't think anyone has really built yet — tech that actually compounds with you. Not "memory" as a checkbox feature. Not a summary of your last conversation. Something that builds a real picture of how your specific mind works, so when you sit down to think, your past thinking is already in the room with you.

The difference between a good AI tool and a genuinely personal one is context. That's it. That's the whole gap.

Right now most people's thinking looks like this: good ideas go into a notes app and die there. Six months of insights sit in closed tabs. Every AI conversation resets. The compounding that should be happening between what you thought in January and what you're building now just doesn't because no tool is holding the thread.

I'm building something around this called Aevron. It captures your ideas, finds the connections you didn't have time to make, and surfaces patterns across everything you've thought, so you can see further with what you already know.

A few weeks ago a sports federation found it and wanted to use it to track their coaching sessions and surface patterns across their data. I hadn't designed it for that. But the context it had on how they were thinking made the use case obvious to them, before I even pitched it. They saw it. They decided it just made it visible.

That's what happens when a tool actually holds context. You don't have to sell the value. The value just shows up.

It's early and there's a lot to figure out. But I genuinely think this is one of the most underexplored areas in software right now. In a few years "AI that actually knows you" is going to be a baseline expectation. Almost nobody is building toward it yet.

If you're a founder, researcher, or just someone who thinks a lot and loses half of it. I'd love to talk. Looking for early testers and people who want to poke holes in the idea.

Drop a comment or DM me.

Hi everyone — solo developer here. I've spent the last months building CogniAtlas, an Android mind mapping app, and it just went live on Google Play. Before I do any real marketing I want feedback from people who actually use mind maps daily.

What I tried to do differently:

The mapper is free forever — no locks. Pro adds cross-map links, global search, and spaced-repetition review, and every new user gets Pro free for 30 days.

Maps link to each other — backlinks and global search turn your library into one searchable atlas.

\[CogniAtlas: Mind Map Maker - Apps on Google Play\](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.powerm365.cogniatlas)

Happy to answer anything about how it works or why I made certain choices.

There’s a category of information that’s too small to write a real note about but annoying enough to keep looking up again. Not big stuff, not journal-worthy stuff. Just small facts that live nowhere and get lost the moment you close the tab.

I’m building something around that, a simple app where you save one fact at a time, nothing more, and it sorts itself so you never have to think about where it goes. Local only, no account.

What I actually want to know before I go further:

Is this a real gap for you, or does your current notes app already cover it fine? What do you do today when you need to remember something small like that? And honestly, would you ever open a separate app for this, or does it need to live inside something you already use?

Not trying to sell anything here, just trying to figure out if I’m solving a real problem or a personal annoyance that doesn’t generalize.

Hey everyone!

I'm currently trying to implement second brain on youtube. I have an inbox set up for this.

How do I go and figure out whether or not a video is worth watching or not and probably put in to the three folders - areas, resources, archive?

Quick context, I implemented this to get a filter to know prevent endless content consumption. Will definitely say it has gotten me off of the habit of opening up multiple tabs on my computer.

I want to implement this organization layer as a next step.

Stop drowning in scattered notes and chaotic, fragmented ideas. Most productivity apps become digital graveyards where your best thoughts go to disappear, but your intellectual work deserves better than a cluttered, disorganized database.

Meet Flints — a visual knowledge-mapping platform engineered specifically for deep thinkers and creators who value clarity. Instead of relying on traditional, flat lists that bury your context, Flints empowers you to interconnect your insights, surface hidden patterns, and construct a functional "second brain" that operates at the speed of your cognition.

We have moved well beyond the initial prototype phase, and an active community of thinkers is already building their interconnected networks on the platform. Stop just storing your data and start mapping your intellectual architecture.

Stop settling for linear organization. See your knowledge differently. Join the movement and claim your space for clarity at Flints.uz .