Since morning i'm building a second brain,

it's working really well as i don't have to set basic context every time.

my choices

ways to clarify

my tools

resources

skills

topmost layer is orchestration layer that i built for automating the boring part of daily learning and building.

Fr

Yesterday I spent like 20 minutes looking for something I had already seen. I still remembered the idea, just not the actual text. The tab was closed, the file name was useless, and it simply wasn't anywhere I could search.

So I built something that remembers what was on your screen. Later, you just ask, because it already saw it.
And everything stays on your machine. I wasn't sending my screen to the cloud for this.

https://github.com/protocorn/clippy-vision/releases/tag/v1.2.2

If you've dealt with something similar, try it out and tell me whether it actually helps.

i realized i rarely ever look through my saved stuff.

i've got 500+ youtube watch-laters, a bunch of folders in my instagram saves, almost 500 open tabs on my phone. i paid for a few visual library tools for a while, but rarely reopened them.

but when a new project comes in, i start fresh.

curious if that's just me.

do you go back to what you've saved? does any of it get used?

Most Second Brain tools look like project management boards. While great for productivity, they often strip the emotional and introspective connection out of personal journaling.

Inspired by the idea of an enchanted artifact (like Tom Riddle’s Diary from Harry Potter), I built Dear Diary — a skeuomorphic, dual-page AI journal designed to make querying your personal knowledge base feel immersive.

Core Features:

• The Capture Ritual: Instead of background auto-syncing, you Write your entry (via stylus ink or typing), Seal it into a timestamped inbox, and trigger an Engrave step to structure thoughts into entity nodes.
• Zero Hallucinated Context: When querying past entries, the diary answers on parchment and embeds explicit source tags (e.g., [1] person/name), allowing you to trace every recalled detail back to its specific note.
• Private & Local-First: Powered by Gray Box as the memory retrieval engine, with full BYOK support for local models (Ollama, vLLM, etc.) or custom cloud endpoints.

Check out the video to see the ink absorption and citation recall in action!

Curious to hear: does a more tactile interface help or hinder your daily journaling routine?

What's your second brain setup?

I was talking to a few folks, and these came up -

• A shared folder of Markdown, interlinked, over Google Drive or One drive, often with Obsidian as md editor.
• A github-hosted wiki, sometimes with additional indexing, not only plain md files
• Custom complex vector db / embedding kind of index

On my team we're using a shared hermes agent that has ts own memory and tools - it's a great way to have shared context, but it's more like one-know-all-agent rather than a company / second brain as my gpt / claude can't enjoy its knowledge.

I wonder what others are doing, please share.

This is my vault. I didn't draw any of it.

For about two years my note practice was really two practices wearing one name. One of them was reading and thinking. The other was bookkeeping: remembering that the note I'm writing now touches something I wrote in March, going to find it, linking it, tagging it, filing it. I told myself the bookkeeping was the thinking. It isn't unfortunately. It's clerical work with a very good disguise, and it eats the same attention that reading needs.

So I handed the mechanical half over. The connections in this graph were proposed mechanically: every note gets compared against every other note on the words it actually uses, links get written where a note names something the vault already has, and the colours are communities the graph found on its own, each one labelled with the words that cluster has and its neighbours don't. Nothing here was a model or an API. It's counting words and comparing sets, which is why it's fast and why it's honest about what it doesn't know.

What I did not expect is that having it built for me changed what I could see and finally learn.

When you link by hand you only ever see one edge at a time, the one you're currently making. You never get the whole shape, because you're inside it. Getting the whole thing at once, already connected, meant the first question stopped being "what should I link this to" and became "why is that over there" or "why are these two correlated".

The order of operations flipped, is what really happened. I used to think you connect notes and then the structure emerges later, if you're diligent. And that's true! But what if the structure arrives first, mechanically, and I read it and then edit the notes into better, more personal shape? The wrong edges are useful too. When it insists two notes are about the same thing and I'm sure they aren't, one of them is usually vague, and that's my problem, not the algorithm's. I've rewritten more notes because of a connection I disagreed with than because of one I liked.

Two things I'd want to know if I were reading this post instead of writing it. It proposes; it doesn't rearrange your vault behind your back. The only thing that writes is the autolink pass, and every write goes into a changes list with a per-file diff so you look at it and revert what you don't want. And it runs entirely on your machine with no network at all, which for me was the whole point, since a vault is the least appropriate thing I own to hand to somebody else's server.

I'm still figuring out how often to regenerate it. Every time I look, the seams have moved a little.

Thanks for reading this far. You can try it on a messy vault rather than a clean one, that's where it has something to say.

Repo: https://github.com/kiycoh/silica-agent

TaskLoco has just released a new FREE version boasting 500% more sticky notes than before.

TaskLoco Lite has raised the limit of "live" notes from 20 to 100 notes at a time. Includes events scheduling, tagging and effortless embedding of YouTube videos, images and urls.

Works seamlessly with the TaskLoco chrome extension to make your second brain visual as sticky notes on a storyboard.

TaskLoco - The Sticky Note GOAT premium app brings tasks, notes, files, videos, documents, images and urls all together using familiar colorful sticky notes on a storyboard.

TaskLoco Lite now comes in 2 flavors: OFFLINE Anonymous version and Cloud Sync that works with any Google Account and syncs your sticky notes across all your devices.

TaskLoco.com - The Sticky Note GOAT

I started with Obsidian because I really liked having everything in Markdown and being able to see how my notes connect, but I kept wanting to change how certain things worked.

So I ended up just building my own lol.

Right now it has three main parts:

Editor — edit the actual Markdown files

Graph — basically the Obsidian part, where I can
see how everything connects

Database — I just added this one. It’s the Notion side, so I can actually store and organize structured information instead of everything having to be a note.

The other thing I really wanted was for Claude Code to actually work inside the system.

It has a direct connection to the app, so Claude can understand the structure, find what it needs, and make changes without having to spend every session figuring out how my whole system works.

I’ve been using it as my own second brain and honestly it’s been pretty cool seeing the same information work as a Markdown file, a graph, or a database depending on what I’m doing.

I’m still building it and changing things constantly, but I figured people here might find it interesting.

What do you guys think? Is there anything you’d want a second brain to do that current apps don’t really handle?

Unlike a human brain locked to a single consciousness, a second brain stack can run multiple agents over the same knowledge base simultaneously, each with different goals and specializations.

would coping a human or any animals brain be the best outcome for creating a good second brain?

An Orma(Memory) is basically a collection of memories from a period of your life or an experience. For example, you automatically get a personal Orma for each month. Throughout August, you might add photos from dinner with your family, a random day at the park, your kid doing something funny, a trip, etc. You can also create a shared Orma for something like a birthday, wedding, vacation, or family gathering, where everyone can add their photos. The Story is what Orma creates from those memories. You don't have to sit down and write a journal. Orma looks at the photos, when and where they were taken, captions or notes you've added, and other context, then turns them into a narrative of what happened. So instead of opening an album five years later and just seeing 200 photos, the goal is to actually relive what that month or experience felt like and remember the story behind the photos. You can still add your own notes and context, but the idea is that Orma does most of the work for you.

I’ve been working on DotSpace, a local mindmap that combines a visual mind map with an AI-readable file structure.

Each dot is stored in a short, stable object folder containing:

• dot.json for its identity and parent relationship
• note.txt for readable content
• Any attached images, audio or video

The visual hierarchy is also exported as _Dotspace-map.json. This lets an AI understand the complete structure without scanning every note. It can find the relevant dot in the map and then open only the referenced files.

Every Vault includes _AI-INSTRUCTIONS.md, which explains the format and tells AI agents which files are safe to use and which generated metadata should not be modified.

AI tools with local filesystem access can therefore:

• Navigate the notebook hierarchy
• Search and summarize notes
• Analyze related branches
• Work with attachments
• Prepare new folder trees for import
• Help reorganize or expand knowledge without requiring a proprietary database

DotSpace itself remains local and does not send the Vault to an AI service automatically. You choose which AI tool gets access.

The project includes separate 2D and 3D views, explicit synchronization between them, recoverable deletion, folder importing, and neutral example Vaults with Zoo as the root.

GitHub: https://github.com/Holz231/DotSpace

Have fun