Have you ever written down an idea, and suddenly found yourself making connections to other ideas? You think you’ll remember them later, but you don’t.
That happens to me a lot. I have waves of inspiration, and in my writing process I often feel like many ideas and connections get lost.
Information loss is a big topic for me right now because I see it everywhere in organisations. So I thought I would get practical and build a tool to solve this problem in my personal writing.
The tool I created is called KEEP-THAT-IDEA and I think it’s a bit different from anything I’ve seen out there. Here are some learnings from this experiment.
Keeping it simple
So, the goal was to capture ideas that belong to different buckets, for example different chapters of a book, using separate “panels”. With the option to save the content in those panels as Markdown or HTML.
For now, this simple feature is all I wanted the tool to include. I intentionally limited myself to a maximum of four panels and no additional features, to keep the experience simple and visually clean. And to wait and see what feedback I receive from real users about what would be useful to add next.
Why Markdown and HTML?
Markdown files are so simple and so useful, and they are the best format for LLMs to process. I’m also not a fan of the Word format which forces constant manual styling adjustments.
If you are not familiar with Markdown, here is a very useful Markdown guide. But if you simply type text with no formatting at all, that is fine too.
I also included the option to save the notes as HTML, making it easy to share them with others in a familiar format. Anyone can open an HTML file in a browser.
The real point
The real point was also to build something without overthinking it. Something I had imagined and wanted to use myself.
You will see that on the technical side, this is a very simple static website hosted simply as a GitHub Page. And I used Grok as my LLM coding assistant. I’m quite excited about how LLMs can help us build tools and solve problems at such high velocity.
An invitation
What would you build if you gave yourself just one day to create something? What idea has been in your mind for a while?
I hope you found something useful or inspiring in this issue of the newsletter.
Until next time,
Silvina.