The thinking & ideas system
This is my favourite part of the whole system, and the reason the rest of it exists. I think constantly - walking, reading, at 2am - and for years almost none of it survived the night. Now all of it does, and it comes back to me connected to everything else I have thought. I can link far more ideas together than I used to, and somewhere along the way the system turned into a thought-partner, because it spots linkages I don't, and it frames and structures my ideas in ways that let me spot the linkages it doesn't. It is also the sole reason for many a 5am bedtime over the last few months.
A thought becomes a finished note without me doing anything else. I speak into my phone, into an ideas channel or a journal channel, or I type something out. By the end of the day that capture has become a properly written note - journal fragments turned into full sentences in my own voice with nothing dropped, each idea filed as its own note, everything dated, tagged and cross-linked into the rest of the vault. The raw recording is kept verbatim forever, so I never have to trust the polished version blindly.
My journal works for me while I sleep. Journal entries don't just sit there, they get mined. A task I mentioned in passing lands in my task system. Something I said about what I want, or where I am heading, feeds my goals layer. A book someone recommended or a restaurant I loved gets pulled out into the taste system, and a stray idea gets split off into the ideas lane. Journalling stopped being a diary at some point and became an input into everything else I run.
Everything I have ever written is one searchable library. Essays, ideas, journal entries, working documents, all in one library, tagged by type and by my standing intellectual interests (AI, consciousness and rationality among them). When I want everything I have ever thought about consciousness, I get the essay I published, the half-formed idea from a walk and the lecture where it came up, together, even though they arrived through completely different doors.
Everything I read and listen to lives here too. The library is more than my own writing. Every article, podcast and video worth keeping goes in through one capture shortcut on my phone, and arrives fetched, summarised, tagged and filed, linked to its source and to whatever related material is already in the vault.
An example flow. It runs end to end without me touching a file. I finish a podcast on a walk, share it to the capture shortcut, then speak an idea note with my reflections on it. By the evening the podcast is filed and summarised, my reflections are written up as an idea note linked to it, and every concept either one touches is linked to the related essays, articles and thoughts already in the library. Weeks later, when I am thinking about the same topic again, I ask Claude one question and get back a synthesis of every related concept, framework and idea I have ever captured - the reading, my reactions to it and the connections between them - assembled in seconds.
I can interrogate what I have studied. I have a set of consultants, which are AI agents each grounded in a specific body of work I have actually engaged with. One is built on the LessWrong Sequences and stress-tests my reasoning when I have a decision to make. Others are built on my MBA coursework, so I can ask my negotiation course a question the night before a real negotiation. Another is grounded in the published writing of a thinker on identity and leadership whose work I studied. When a question is big enough I convene several of them at once and have them argue - each critiques the others' positions blind, and I get a synthesis that keeps the disagreement visible rather than averaging it away.
Everything connects itself. Every note carries a live block showing what it links to and what it overlaps with (shared people, shared topics, shared threads, ranked), and I don't maintain any of it.
The loop underneath all of this is capture, distil, connect, interrogate. Catch everything cheaply, turn it into writing worth keeping, let the connections assemble themselves, and then question the accumulated whole as if it were a colleague who has read everything I have ever read and written and forgotten none of it. The pipelines, schemas and scheduled jobs that make this run are documented in the infrastructure pages - this page is what they are for.