(2022-03-15) Appleton Programmable Notes

Maggie Appleton on Programmable Notes. Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows.

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 software doesn't guide us towards any particular workflows or ways of thinking with our notes. We have to develop them ourselves.

Thankfully, there's a long history of people finding ways to make these cognitive tasks easier.... But we've yet to see note-taking software that actively facilitates and encourages these workflows. They are, for the most part, still behaving like storage boxes.

Agents can prompt you to do specific activities in a sequence. They can ask you questions. They can suggest relevant material based on what you've already written. They can periodically resurface old ideas to ask if they still ring true. They can prompt you to connect two disparate ideas together. They can mimic conversational partners who debate the strengths and weaknesses of a point – naive partners perhaps, but still better than no partner at all.

let's make this tangible with some examples:

• When I open my note-taking app first thing in the morningask what I'm currently thinking about. Once I've marked this complete, show me what I said yesterday, three days ago, and last week.
• When a week has passed since I've written notes on a bookask me everything I remember about it off the top of my head. Put this into the summary section of my notes as a first draft.
• When I state a claimask what evidence I have to back it up and what other notes, books, or academic articles I want to mark as sources for this claim.

The Smartblocks plug-in for Roam Research is the system I personally use to build these types of workflows. It offers a set of triggers, variables, and commands. There are a wide range of user-created plug-ins for similar platforms like Obsidian and Logseq that enable some of these same workflows. Coda is another app that allows users to build fairly complex programmatic systems within documents.

But what about AI???

Elicit has an alternative suite of tools that I find much more intriguing for our use case. Using the same NLP technology you can run requests like: Clarify a concept...