Field Notes

The Ideaflow Blog

Notes on intelligence amplification, shared memory, and the brain we're building around today's LLMs.

Featured · LLMs

Today's LLM is just a language cortex in a jar

Every serious AI product today is an attempt to bolt missing brain parts onto a language cortex. Here's the anatomy of what's actually being built — and what's still missing.

7 min read · Read →
Teams

Your team's memory resets every Monday

Every week you re-explain the same decisions, re-find the same context, re-discover what someone already knew. That's not a culture problem. It's a tooling problem.

4 min read · Read →
Foundations

The puzzle pieces are in different heads

Tim Berners-Lee's most underquoted line, revisited in the LLM era — and why agents change the math on superconnecting.

5 min read · Read →
Coming soon

Memex was 80% right

Vannevar Bush imagined a personal memory machine in 1945. Most of what he missed turned out to be what LLMs do well. Most of what he got right, we still don't have.

— · Draft
Coming soon

Context engineering is the new prompt engineering

The prompt doesn't matter if the memory is wrong. A practical guide to building context layers around language models.

— · Draft
Coming soon

Zettelkasten for agents

Niklas Luhmann's slip-box gave one man 70,000 notes that talked to each other. We're building the version where every agent you own shares the same box.

— · Draft
Philosophy

Intelligence amplification, not artificial intelligence

Why we still prefer Engelbart's framing — humans augmented by tools — over the race to replace them. And what that means for what we build.

4 min read · Read →