💭 in your head · nothing to type
Imagine the service that holds all your notes shuts down a year from now. Or triples its price.
What would you still have in your hands? Notes, habits, links between ideas — or just an export nobody can read?
Someone will say: "A second brain is a great thing, but it is expensive." Think about what exactly you would be paying for: the storage, the model, or someone else's wrapper around them?
💭 in your head · nothing to type
Split a second brain into three parts. Memory is what you know and have decided. The model is what thinks. The agent is the hands that read memory and add to it.
What usually costs a lot is a ready-made wrapper where all three parts are glued together and live somewhere else. If memory is plain files in your folder, you can swap the model and keep the memory.
Recall module 05: AGENTS.md, TODO.md, STATE.md. That is already the seed of a second brain. What does it lack to become someone you can talk to?
The phrase "second brain" was popularized by Tiago Forte, including through his book "Building a Second Brain" (2022). For him it is a note system a person keeps.
Here we add an agent to the notes. In this module, a second brain is a folder of files that your agent reads and adds to when you ask. Not an app and not a subscription.
A second brain rests on three layers: memory, an agent and a channel.
AGENTS.md), where you left off (STATE.md), tasks (TODO.md), notes and archive (for example, a notes/ folder).