I'll be watching closely, we're moving this way very quickly. If you get there it'll save me a job!
One thought, the knowledge graph rowboat creates is passive, based on context in emails, transcripts etc. A tool to pull further context from an individual would be amazing. Sit there and chat with it to flush out all of the tribal knowledge (gotchas in this spec).
We have Context Capsules running in production as agent context (amongst other layers of governance) to define metrics etc, so we can guarantee what you see in your dashboard matches exactly what your invoice says, what we're reporting externally, regardless of who is reporting it. Agent or human.
Context Capsules cover business concepts (even org structure), all the way through to implementation. Compounding value from bounded context.
I implemented the Granola Sync when rowboat stopped pulling it in (I have a year's worth of transcripts of pretty much every conversation I've had over the past year).
One shot granola sync in both TypeScript and go from a single Context Capsule:
Nightmare passing markdown files around in this day and age, and yet they are the future. DownKeep is my personal attempt at keeping some sanity, not production!
I actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this!
What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files.
I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in.
Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be awesome.
Granola notes silently stopped working when they decided to encrypt the DB, interesting to see you've got your own in there now.
Love it. Especially the fact you got it physically running on the M5 stack.
My mind immediately went the other way though - feeding it to stop it evolving into the even worse next iteration of itself. Feels like that's where we are right now in the real world! Keep it distracted!
Having spent a good weekend learning how to perform latent-steering through playing with pytorch and a local Gemma4 model, there is no way I could have groked any of that in the the way I did without hands on time.
This is on an M3 Max 36GB I've had for a couple of years. No further outlay needed.
But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it.
Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour.
And the inverse.
Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital.
So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.
This hits a sweet spot I think for conversations too.
I've been playing (for quite a while) on trying to encapsulate long running conversations.
You have the overriding context, facts that don't change very often at all. The participants names, their backgrounds etc.
Then you have some very fine grained facts (what they ate for breakfast this morning) which might be useful right now, but are irrelevant outside of a general trend over the longer term.
When trying to reconstruct a conversation you really need to find the right balance without pulling in everything that has ever been discussed.
Here's a massive document, without any real context as to what thinking went into the points it's making, tell me if it looks ok. Oh, and there's 10 more where that came from.
We're outsourcing the thinking to the recipient.
Yes, it's way easier to create the report now, but it's not being honed down to the crux of the points it needs to make. And the reviewers are expected to what? Up their ability to mentally consume and reason about reports.
I mean, barrier number 1: did you read it yourself before asking someone else seems too high for some..
Part of the problem: you get given a complete document to review after it's been fully baked.
I'm pushing the need for basic engineering principles across whole organisations.
You wouldn't give an engineer 1000 lines of code to review without the original spec of what you're trying to achieve for context (at a minimum, ideally the reviewer was in the room when the work was introduced, and has full context).
So, these docs, they're given as an all or nothing.
Do you push back on the 39th metric that is defined to the utmost detail? Or just resign yourself to the fact that it is what it is?
A one (6 is the goto if we're talking Amazon?!) pager.. "this is what I am proposing" at least gives the skeleton of the idea to push back at the general shape of the idea, refine it, before all the emotional investment of your precious report being complete.
Y'know.. the traditional product running through the spec in a SCRUM* environment.. the engineers doing proper code reviews..
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abovethewater
Author of Context Capsules
https://contextcapsules.com
https://contextcapsules.com/v2/CONTEXT_CAPSULES.md