From Second Brains to Decisionators
Thinking aids, big and small
More and more we are surrounded by tools and tricks to aid our thinking. Of course, LLMs are most prominently under discussion as they appear to be doing some pretty insane thinking themselves. Although they probably don’t really think, they certainly can augment our own thought processes.
In the last few weeks I have been getting deeper and deeper into automating technology around me to allow me to actually do my job. I’ve been getting into the likes of n8n and Make.com, learning about web hooks and APIs and the like. I’m going to write some more about this soon, but in the meantime I loved this interview this week, which I think is well worth your time.
Noah Brier, cofounder of Alephic, has hacked Claude Code into a kind of second brain. Instead of treating AI as a desk-bound typist, he points it at his 1,500-note Obsidian vault and tells it: don’t write - think. The model then sifts, questions, and recombines his ideas, becoming a sparring partner that helps him prepare talks, unearth forgotten connections, and even rescue abandoned trains of thought.
You can catch it here:
A few standouts:
AI as reader, not writer: Brier argues we don’t produce outputs daily, but we’re constantly thinking. The AI’s real power is keeping pace with that.
Agents as continuity keepers: When he’s interrupted, Claude can summarise three days of lost progress, effectively rebooting his mind.
The sabotage connection: In a talk, Brier referenced the CIA’s WWII Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Just as minor disruptions could unravel a factory, small prompts today can reshape entire workflows.
The kicker? He runs this whole system from his phone. Sitting by a pond, he once fixed urgent client code without going back to his desk. Living the dream, right?
Decision matrix
A more .. ahem .. lo-fi way to aid your thinking.
Sci-fi author, RE Stearn, uses this decision making matrix to decide how to handle forks in life. Well, here he discusses how to figure how to twist the plot in his stories, but this could work for anything. Hmm, I wonder I can get ChatGPT do emulate this?
The Decisionator
Finally, Youtuber Makerinator invented a super lo-fi device, using some simple coding and Raspberry pi, to help him and Mrs Makerinator make the big calls, like what to eat, and what to stream. Apparently it saved their marriage.
That’s it for now. Hope this has been well worth your time.
Leon