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I spent quite a bit of time in this particular rabbit hole. Zettelkasten, Roam, Org-Roam, LogSeq, GTD, Anki.... yet I don't think I've stuck with any habit for more than a week or two. I have the same sinking feeling with these tools as I do with programming language development. I'm sure many others here have followed note-taking/PL ideas for years, waiting for the one that will come along and give us superpowers. It feels like we're "so close"... all these tools/languages are almost the perfect blend of concise, expressive, interactive, etc. It's occurred to me recently that we may already be among the last programming languages and note-taking systems to be built. We've tried for decades to design notes and code in ways that suit storage access patterns of our brains. I used to think that meant a breakthrough was inevitable, but now I'm starting to see the efforts having diminishing returns. ChatGPT and its brethren are almost certainly the way forward for most knowledge storage (and the knowledge work that goes with it). The entire class of organization problems melt away when you can communicate in plain language what you'd like to store and retrieve. As chat assistants start to become more integrated in our work, the storage phase will become completely passive. The assistant will automatically accumulate the context it'll need when we come back to it for retrieval. Why would we design new languages and note systems when, quite literally, a general-purpose second brain already exists? I don't mean to discount the creativity and effort of all language and note system designers today. All exploration is valuable, and there are certainly better designs out there to be found. But the best designs don't always win, and we might just be at the point where the imperfect designs that have critical mass might be the ones that stick around forever. |