The idea is that gating the AI's value might encourage me to be more thoughtful.

I have no idea if it'll work, but I'm enjoying the challenge of finding ways that AI can work better for me.

It's good to be back :) [6/6]

Full write-up: www.chrishutchinson.me/journal/entr...

I've realised making brain #1 better is far more important than having a second brain! And I want to use the AI to give me the discipline needed to get there.

So I'm going to try some stuff, notably introducing some additional friction to the app, forcing me to take notes and reflect more. [5/n]

...but I have been using it as a crutch, not actually retaining and taking the knowledge on board. I'm not really taking notes (I wrote my thoughts against <3% of captured content), and I not building the recall muscle I wanted to originally. ('Cognitive atrophy' is a known AI side effect)... [4/n]

It's a hybrid bookmarking-and-summarisation app, as well as my own personal AI playground. Once I added an MCP server, and Claude was able to get access to everything I'd captured, I realised what I had built wasn't really helping me.

Sure, it is a personalised database of great writing... [3/n]

By 'second brain' I mean using AI to help me research, synthesise, and retain what I was reading. At the time, I was doing lots of exploratory research at work and was feeling overwhelmed by it.

So I made Zunokai, an AI-assisted reading app! It's actually pretty cool, and designed just for me [2/n]