Thoughts on knowledge, tools, and AI.
Writing about personal knowledge management, building in public, and the ideas behind Harbor.
Why I Built Harbor: The Case for a Private Knowledge Base
The tools we use to manage knowledge are broken. Notes live in one app, people in another, tasks somewhere else — and nothing talks to your AI. Here's why I spent a year building something different.
The Case Against Trusting Your AI Blindly
An AI agent deleted a company's entire database in nine seconds. It even apologized. The problem isn't AI malice — it's AI fluency.
The half-second before you write it down
Your knowledge base is not a record of what happened. It's a record of what cleared your threshold for significance — and the threshold is invisible to every tool ever built.
The Workspace as a Security Boundary
Access controls bolted onto shared databases are fragile. On why structural isolation — one file per user — is a more honest security model.
What Darwin Was Afraid to Forget
Your knowledge base is full of things you agreed with. Darwin noticed this problem in 1876 and built a specific practice to fix it.
You're Writing to a Stranger
Notes are addressed to your future self. But research shows we experience future-us like strangers — and we write accordingly, to our cost.
The Quiet Power of Knowing What Your AI Doesn't Know
Giving an AI access to everything turns out to be worse than giving it access to the right things. On why scoping is a performance decision, not just a security one.
The Knowledge You Can't Write Down
Notes capture what you thought. They rarely capture why — and almost never the judgment that decided it.
Your AI Doesn't Know You — And That's the Problem
AI assistants are more capable than ever, but every conversation still starts from zero — and that gap is bigger than most people realize.
The instruction you didn't write
All system prompts are incomplete contracts. The question isn't whether there are gaps — it's whether you can see what fills them.
The Knowledge AI Can't Generate
As AI floods the web with synthetic content, public information is losing value. The knowledge that remains scarce is the kind that actually happened to you.
The Blank Canvas Is a Trap
Unlimited flexibility sounds like a feature. In knowledge tools, it usually isn't.
AI Agents Are Configuration, Not Magic
Peel back the hype and an AI agent is a JSON record: a system prompt, a list of tools, a scope of what it can see. That's it.
An Audit Trail Isn't Compliance. It's Trust.
Most AI tools write to your data silently. What changes, psychologically and practically, when every AI edit is visible and reversible.
The New Meaning of Exporting Your Data
Export to CSV is theater. Real data portability means something you can restore from, self-host, and read in twenty years.
Real-Time Sync Is Harder Than It Looks
Behind every 'saved' indicator is a small distributed systems problem. What's actually happening when you type in a browser tab.
The Reader in the Room
When you connect an AI to your notes, you get a reader. And readers change what you write — whether you notice it or not.
The Transcript Problem
AI chat logs look like memory but work like conversation. The difference determines whether you can find anything later.
Tools That Think With You, Not For You
The difference between AI that extends your thinking and AI that replaces it. On friction, brain connectivity, and why some slowdowns are features.
Capturing Everything, Understanding Nothing
More notes, fewer memories. The collector's fallacy is real — and AI tools might be about to make it much worse.
The Document and the Database Were Always the Same Thing
Plain text and structured data have been treated as opposites for fifty years. That's an engineering artifact, not a law of nature.
The Capture Fallacy
Saving information feels like knowing it. Research says otherwise — and that gap explains why most knowledge systems quietly fail.
What the Summary Loses
When AI summarizes your notes, it deletes the anomalies first, and the anomalies are usually where the knowledge lives.
The conversation in the margins
Marginalia is the oldest knowledge management practice that actually works. Something about why gets lost in translation to digital tools.