A user-owned, AI-assisted note system for building a second brain.
Open Notes is an open-source note-taking system built as an experiment in creating a “second brain” — exploring how language models can help organize, enrich, and connect human knowledge over time, while keeping control firmly in the hands of the user.
The project emphasizes ownership, choice, and non-destructive enrichment, allowing users to decide how their notes evolve and which intelligence powers them.
This project is currently work in progress.
The intent behind Open Notes is not just to store notes, but to explore:
- How notes can be enriched using language models
- How ideas can be automatically classified, tagged, and connected
- How a personal knowledge graph can emerge organically
- How AI can assist without replacing human intent
Open Notes is both a practical tool and an exploration of human–AI collaboration in knowledge work.
The Open Notes interface featuring a rich-text editor, sidebar navigation, note organization, and AI-assisted editing capabilities.
All notes belong to the user.
There is no required central server and no enforced AI provider.
At the core of this philosophy is Bring Your Own Model / Key.
This means users are free to decide how intelligence is applied to their notes, including the ability to:
- Stay fully local
- Use private or self-hosted AI
- Connect to public AI services
The system is designed to adapt to the user’s privacy expectations, trust boundaries, and preferred tools.
One of the foundational principles of Open Notes is:
Original notes are never overwritten.
- The original note always remains intact
- AI-enriched versions are stored separately
- Users can clearly distinguish between human-written and AI-generated content
- Enrichment is additive and reversible
This preserves trust, authorship, and long-term clarity.
Open Notes is inspired by second brain concepts, with an emphasis on progressive organization rather than rigid upfront structure.
The goal is to understand how a system can gradually reflect how a human thinks, learns, and connects ideas over time.
Open Notes allows users to define their own organizational logic, including:
- Categories that act as intelligent groupings
- Category-specific prompts defined by the user
- Automatic tagging and classification guided by those prompts
- Notes belonging to multiple categories simultaneously
This keeps structure flexible while allowing intelligence to scale with usage.
Over time, Open Notes aims to support:
- AI-generated supplements to notes
- Auto-generated tags and classifications
- Chunking and embedding of both original and enriched content
- Semantic discovery across notes
- Emergent knowledge graphs built from relationships and context
All enrichment remains:
- Optional
- User-directed
- Model-agnostic
- Not a black-box AI note app
- Not a system that silently rewrites your thoughts
- Not a mandatory cloud or SaaS product
- Not a replacement for human thinking
AI remains a tool — not an authority.
🚧 Work in Progress
Open Notes is in early development and active exploration:
- Ideas are still evolving
- Features may change significantly
- Documentation will mature alongside the project
- People exploring second brain systems
- Knowledge workers, researchers, and learners
- Users who want AI assistance without surrendering control
- Builders interested in human-centric AI systems
Open Notes is released under the MIT License.
Open Notes is an exploration of a fundamental question:
How can we organize, evolve, and maintain a digital clone of a human’s knowledge — one that mirrors a person’s thinking and learning over time?
Write · Enrich · Connect · Gift