A plain-text castle of understanding.
Understanding, built up through word — one honest line at a time. Local to your device, plain markdown, no server, no account, no lock-in. It grows because you tend it, and it stays readable forever because it's just text.
node insight.mjs add "Scoped + honest beats grand + faked, every time." --leaning #craft
node insight.mjs list
node insight.mjs review # surface old hunches to revisitA frictionless place to keep what you come to understand, so it accumulates instead of evaporating. Each insight is one clear sentence, with:
- a certainty label —
hunch→leaning→sure. A fresh thought defaults to hunch and earns its way up. (This is the Clear Standard's principle #6, lived: you never fake how sure you are.) - a date — when you knew it (freshness, #4).
- optional tags and a source link (where it came from, #1).
That's the whole format. You can read, grep, edit, or git it like any text.
It does not create by itself. There are no autonomous "creation loops" that spin up understanding while you sleep — that's perpetual motion, and a tool that claimed it would be lying about its own state.
What's real is a loop you close:
capture a thought → revisit it later (
review) → connect it to others → act → a new, better thought → capture.
insight removes the friction at capture and revisit. You are the engine.
That's not less magic — it's the kind that actually runs.
- Native first. Everything lives in
insights.mdon your machine. Works with no internet at all. - Expands through contact. When a thought comes from something you read, add
--src <url>; the castle gains a window to the outside without depending on it. - Organised by use. Tags and
searchare enough until they aren't; the file stays legible because each entry is small and honest.
| command | does |
|---|---|
add "<text>" [--sure|--leaning|--hunch] [#tag …] [--src <url>] |
save an insight (defaults to hunch) |
list [#tag] |
show all insights, or one tag |
search <term> |
show insights matching a term |
review [n] |
surface the oldest not-yet-sure insights to revisit |
Storage is ./insights.md (override with INSIGHT_FILE=/path).
A castle of understanding isn't built by a machine that builds castles. It's built by someone who keeps laying one honest stone, and comes back to look.