Programmable Notes

This warehouse approach to notes requires us – the human agent in the system – to do a lot of cognitive labour if we want to use our notes. And using our notes is the entire point of any note-taking enterprise.

Most "note-taking" or "knowledge management" software acts as a passive storage container. You create notes, shuffle them around into folders, add a few tags, and then they sit there. Waiting. Until you consciously remember to go looking for them.

What if we started to think about note-taking systems as active agents, rather than receptacles?  We could, in essence, run automated programmes and algorithms over our notes. Programmes that we have the agency to write as users.

We've yet to see note-taking platforms meaningfully add AI affordances into their systems, but there are hints at how they could in other platforms.

The most impressive and promising I've seen is Elicit, a research tool that helps academics and students find relevant papers and data based on natural language inputs. You can ask it a question like "What's the point of note-taking?" and receive a list of research papers that are likely to hold the answer. Even better, Elicit creates a one sentenc... See more