It seems you're more accustomed to treating stored information as memories rather than a knowledge base. That's perfectly fine. However, I personally believe that the progress humans and AI have made to reach our current stage likely stems largely from the accumulation of knowledge, combined with the evolution driven by new challenges!
It's only useful in the context of understanding myself.
“Knowledge base” can imply objective truth and completeness, which creates pressure. For a lot of us, what we store is really a snapshot of attention, curiosity, anxiety, and identity at a moment in time — more like a personal log than a database.
One framing that helps me is: the archive isn’t “truth”, it’s “evidence of what I cared about”, and it’s only useful when it reduces friction for a real moment (re-entry, reflection, or a concrete next step). Otherwise it’s just noise.
Do you find it more useful as a mirror (patterns about yourself), or as a tool (helping you make decisions / take action)?
In other cases these notes are a complement to my photos. They show a different aspect of my life at a given moment. My photos don't show that on September 4, 2015, I had a massive crush on someone. I have built a timeline that combines my journals, photos, sketches, geolocation, Google searches and other things. It reveals a far more nuanced picture of me at a given time.
I also have more technical notes. Those are a bit of a "collection of facts". It's a bit like putting all the parts on the table, and slowly organising them into a coherent structure. This is how I approach bigger topics before I understand them fully. Then my notes act as a sort of medium-term memory. When I finish a project, I usually have a bunch of leftover notes and todos that I don't intend to ever finish. That's why I say that notes are not an obligation.
The “notes aren’t an obligation” line also resonates — treating them as medium-term memory rather than a forever archive removes a lot of pressure.
When you finish a project and you have leftover notes/todos you don’t intend to finish, do you actively prune/close them (mark done/obsolete), or do you just let them fade and trust that what matters will resurface naturally?
I also recommend reading this comment:
I even got to a point where I made an "anti-memory system" - a MCP tool that just calls a model without context from the full conversation or past conversations, to get a fresh perspective. And I instruct the host model to reveal only partially the information we discussed, explaining that creativity is sparked when LLMs get to see not too much, not too little - like a sexy dress.
When it comes to stimulating AI creativity, it may indeed be better to impose fewer constraints. However, in most scenarios, problems are likely still solved through simple information aggregation, refinement, analysis, and planning, right?
I hate the concept of a “second brain” but this isn’t necessarily true. Those guides you make at work seemingly precede the action of someone else, right? And even if the notes you write for yourself aren’t needed afterwards, don’t they contribute to “doing the thing”?