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Here's a number that bothered me for a week after I worked it out. I read about 70 books a year, and I highlight maybe 30 things in each one. That's 2,100 highlights a year, and the honest truth is I will never reread almost any of them.

The same is true of my meeting notes, my half-finished ideas, the things I jot down on a Sunday morning that felt important at the time. Most of my thinking ends up in folders I never open again. I suspect yours does too.

For years, I treated this as a personal failing, like I just needed more discipline. It isn't a discipline problem. It's a problem with who the notes were written for, and that changed in 2026.

In April, Andrej Karpathy made an observation that stuck with me: treat your notes as a wiki that the AI can read. For most of history, the only audience for your notes was future-you, who is forgetful and busy and rarely shows up. Now there's a second reader. Claude can read your notes on your behalf, on demand, and answer questions across all of them in seconds.

That sounds small until you sit with it. It means the value of a note is no longer limited by whether you personally remember to look at it. You can write something once and ask Claude, months later, "what did I capture about pricing this year?" and get a real answer pulled from notes you'd long forgotten. Your past thinking stops being dead weight and becomes something you can actually query.

But there's a catch, and it's the reason most people's notes still don't work this way.

A pile of unstructured notes is almost as hard for Claude to reason over as it is for you. If everything lives in one giant scratch page, or scattered across a hundred untitled files, the model has nothing to grab onto. What makes notes AI-readable is structure: consistent places for things, light metadata that says what each note is, and a system simple enough that you actually keep it up.

You can feel the difference yourself right now, before changing anything. Point Claude at whatever notes you already have and run this:

It'll work, sort of, and that "sort of" is the point. On messy notes you get a rough answer. On structured ones you get something genuinely useful. The gap between those two is the whole game, and closing it is what I've spent the last year building.

I run my entire operation, my writing, my projects, my reading, on a single system built around an old method called PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive). The version I use is tuned specifically so Claude can read and reason over it. It took me a year of daily use and one full rebuild to get it right.

I packaged exactly what I use into the AI Second Brain Kit. It's a complete working setup, not an empty template: the four PARA folders with real sample notes, a daily-note structure, a 9-chapter guide that teaches the whole system in about 90 minutes, 25 starter prompts for working with Claude on top of your notes, and a setup checklist that gets you running in 30 minutes.

It comes in three versions, and the only choice you need to make is which app you already live in:

Obsidian, if you want your notes as plain files on your disk that Claude Code can read directly, with no lock-in. The Obsidian vault is here.

Notion, if you want database power and you already run your life in Notion, readable by Claude through the native connector. The Notion template is here.

Craft, if you're an Apple person who wants the most beautiful version, connected to Claude through Craft's native integration. The Craft template is here.

Each one is $49, and that's not an arbitrary number. It's a year of refinement and a full rebuild, packaged so you don't spend a frustrating weekend building a worse version yourself. Every future update is free once you own it, and for the first 30 days you get a private buyers-only Discord channel where I answer your setup questions directly.

Run the prompt above on your existing notes tonight. Even messy, even unstructured, it'll show you something about your own thinking you'd forgotten, and you'll feel the pull of what a properly readable system could do. That feeling is the reason I built this. Your notes are some of the most valuable things you own. It's time they started working for you instead of dying quietly in a folder.

Raja
The Useful Tech

Not sure if PARA is for you or if you're migrating from another app? Reply to this email with your setup. I'll point you to the right version or talk you out of buying it if it isn't a fit. And the free Useful Tech Club on Discord is open if you'd like to think this through with other people first.