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Colin RodriguesRev. 2026.09 — Berlin
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Brain2

in-progress

A single-user work knowledge system that converts messy inputs - handwritten notes, pasted text, PDFs, voice memos and forwarded email - into structured, reviewable long-term work memory.

Timeframe

Q1 2026

Status

in-progress

Last Updated

Categories

aiknowledge-managementproductivityocrsemantic-searchembeddingsnote-takingautomation

About This Project

A single-user work knowledge system that converts messy inputs - handwritten notes, pasted text, PDFs, voice memos and forwarded email - into structured, reviewable long-term work memory.

The pipeline is capture, parse, review, save, export: an input is uploaded or pasted, OpenAI extracts structured data in a single vision call that handles OCR and extraction together, the user edits every field on a review page, and only then is it written to Supabase and auto-exported as markdown.

Extracted content is decomposed into linked entities - notes, tasks, people, projects, domains, decisions, open questions and ideas - each with its own list and detail view, joined through cross-link tables.

Semantic search runs over entity embeddings, and an AI linking pass suggests connections between notes that were never explicitly related, turning a capture tool into something that surfaces its own connections.

Merge and dedup tooling for people, projects and domains keeps the graph clean as real data accumulates, alongside a maintenance dashboard and compiled wiki summaries per entity.

Tech Stack

Next.jsTypeScriptReactTailwind CSSSupabasePostgreSQLOpenAIZustandVercel

Why I Built This

Work context was scattered across handwritten notebooks, chat transcripts and half-finished documents, none of which were searchable once the week had moved on.

Existing note apps store what you wrote; the gap was turning an unstructured capture into linked entities - who was involved, what was decided, what is still open - without retyping it all by hand.

The non-negotiable was that nothing becomes canonical until a human reviews and confirms it. AI drafts the structure, the user owns the record.

Wanted one place where a photo of a notebook page, a voice memo on the way home and a forwarded email all land in the same reviewable inbox and end up in the same graph.

Key Learnings

✓Using GPT-4o Vision with Structured Outputs collapses OCR and extraction into a single call. Fewer moving parts than a separate OCR step feeding a second model, and the schema constraint removes most of the parsing cleanup.
✓Making review mandatory before anything is saved turned out to be a product feature rather than friction - it keeps trust in the data high and means extraction does not have to be perfect to be useful.
✓Adding entity embeddings and AI note-to-note linking was the point the project stopped being a structured capture tool and started surfacing connections I had forgotten existed.
✗Merge and dedup tooling for people, projects and domains was not in the original scope. Real usage produced duplicate entities fast, and retrofitting merges across junction tables was more work than designing for them up front.
✗Parallel feature branches merged the same day produced three migrations sharing a 014 prefix, leaving the apply order ambiguous on a fresh database. Migration numbering needs to be resolved at merge time, not branch time.
✗CI covers lint, type check and build but there is no test suite, so the parse and save path - where data integrity actually lives - is only verified by hand.

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