most people's notes are where ideas go to die.
a notion page you never open again. a notes app with 400 untitled entries. screenshots you saved and forgot. i had all of that.
so i built a second brain. it's a folder of plain markdown files that an AI reads, writes to, and thinks with. no fancy app. no subscription. just files and a model that knows the whole folder.
here's why i actually use it, and how it works.
why it's useful (the honest part)
the real reason this exists: i was tired of re-explaining myself to a chatbot every single time. who i am, what i'm working on, what i shipped last week. paste, paste, paste, then ask the question.
now there's one folder that holds all of it. work, projects, personal goals, raw notes. and the AI i use can read the whole thing at once.
so when i ask it something, it already knows the context. it knows i intern at remotestar. it knows kiks studios is my thing. it knows what moved this week and what's gone quiet. i don't feed it any of that. it's just there.
that's the unlock. context, already loaded, every time.
it goes both ways
this is the part people miss when they build a notes vault. most setups are read-only in practice. you write into them and never get anything back out.
mine is two-directional. i talk to it, it writes back into the files.
when i run a check-in, it asks me one question per work stream and takes my answers and edits the actual markdown. i'm not sitting there formatting notes by hand. i answer like i'm talking to someone, and it files everything where it belongs. later it reads that same stuff back to help me plan.
info goes in by conversation. it gets sorted to the right file. it comes back out as context when i need it. that loop is the whole thing.
how it's built
every note flows through the same lifecycle. capture it, sort it, distill it, then use it. tiago forte calls this CODE.
raw stuff lands in Inbox/ first. always. i don't decide where it goes when i capture it, because that's friction and friction kills the habit.
the folders aren't by topic. they're by how actionable the thing is. this is PARA. a project has a finish line. an area is ongoing, like my remotestar role. resources are reference i might pull from later. archive is done stuff i never delete.
everything is linked
here's where it gets good. every file links to other files. and shivansh.md, my master profile, sits in the middle as the hub everything connects back to.
my obsidian graph view. shivansh.md is the big node in the center, everything links back to it
that web isn't decoration. the AI follows those links. ask about one project and it pulls in the people, the client, the related notes, the personal context around it, because they're all connected.
this is why my planning actually works. when it gives me a weekly review or a morning brief, it isn't guessing. it walks the graph. one true profile in the center, everything else hanging off it, all reachable in one read.
the commands i run on top
a folder of notes is just a folder. the AI layer is what makes it feel alive. i wrote a few custom commands, each one reads the vault and does one job:
- check-in walks me through each work stream and writes my answers back into the files. this is the two-way loop in action.
- think reads everything and tells me what it notices. contradictions, a stream going quiet, leverage i'm missing. it doesn't ask questions or change anything, it just gives me an honest read.
- morning hands me today's focus and a standup draft.
- plan does a friday review and picks one focus per stream for next week.
- spark turns what i'm actually working on into post ideas i could write today.
think and check-in are the two i lean on most. one keeps the vault current, the other tells me what i'm not seeing.
the voice rule
quick one. AI writing has a tell. em-dashes everywhere, "it's not x, it's y," lists of three, words like delve and leverage and robust.
so anything that comes out of this folder runs through a humanizer skill first. i imported it from github and tuned it to a few sample posts of mine, so the output reads like me typing instead of a press release. this blog went through it.
how it lives on two machines
i work off a macbook air and a mac mini. the vault sits in iCloud drive and both machines point a symlink at it. so does the config that holds the commands and the memory.
open obsidian on either mac and it's the same brain. start the AI on either one and it has the same context. nothing to sync by hand.
the takeaway
the value was never the notes. plenty of people have notes. the value is one place that's true, linked together, that a model can read all at once and write back into.
a markdown folder costs nothing. the linking and the two-way loop are what turn it from a graveyard into a coworker. build the folder, keep it honest, connect everything, then point a model at it.
your notes already know you. they just couldn't talk back yet.
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