Adaptivesoftwareforevolvingwork
Noteshell gives AI agents your context so they can create the software your work needs, and reshape it for whatever comes next.
The Architecture
Carbon holds four bonds at once, and what it does with them is the whole story. Flatten them into sheets of hexagons and you get graphite. Point them at the corners of a tetrahedron and the same atoms become diamond.
The Recipe
Diamond is the denser arrangement, so it has to be paid for in pressure. Along a continental geotherm the two forms trade places somewhere past a hundred kilometres down — below that line graphite is the stable form; past it, carbon prefers the net.
The Extremes
Every superlative diamond carries comes from the same tetrahedral net: short bonds, no slip planes, nothing loose to lose. It is the hardest natural material, it moves heat better than copper, and its band gap is wide enough that visible light passes straight through.
The Instrument
Two brilliant cuts, tips ground flat and set facing each other. Diamond is transparent and does not yield, so you can watch a sample while you crush it — which is how we know what water does under pressure.
A drop of water is loaded between the culets, in a gasket no wider than a grain of salt.
Coda
One element, five chapters. The distance between a pencil line and a wedding ring is the angle between four bonds — and whether the lattice grew in the mantle or in a chamber, it ends at the same place.
Built for the work. Rebuilt when it changes.
A tracker, a lesson, a deck, a live analysis. Your agent builds what this step needs, and it stays yours to open, operate, and reshape by asking.
CLICK A FORM. THE BIG CARD FOLLOWS.
Alive, not printed.
Figures are instruments. Drag the outlier and the numbers in the sentence recompute mid-read.
Why squared error fears the outlier
Five measurements, one stray. Fit a line by least squares 1 and the stray point tugs the whole fit toward itself: the mean squared error stands at MSE 1.77 while the absolute error 2 asks only MAE 0.70.
At ×2.5 apart, the square fit is already leaning toward the outlier — drag it further and watch the gap open.
[3]Yours to edit.
Select any line to highlight it, quote it into your thoughts, or hand it to Curio, right where you're reading.
Two small trained matrices can stand in for a fine-tuned model — the update lives in a low-rank sliver of the weights, and the stack above it never notices.
your ink — “prove the rank claim”
Not by analogy — by intuition by building the actual mathematics, in order.
A desk, not a page.
Turn it into a book, pin a second Build on top. The desk holds them all, sources included.
Every famous fossil from the Cambrian explosion postdates the explosion.
This is the first thing to be clear about, because it governs what the Burgess Shale can and cannot say.
Keep it. Send it.
A PDF for print, one interactive HTML file that opens anywhere, or the whole Build to hand over.
The Memory Wall
Compute grew 60,000× in a decade; memory bandwidth grew 100×. The gap is the wall — and it is measured, not guessed.
memory-wall.pdf · 2.1 MB · SOURCES TRAVEL INSIDE
The long work, kept in view.
No stock widgets. Each tile is built from your own notes and data, and Curio sits inside every one of them, ready to change it.
EVERY OBSESSION GETS ITS OWN COCKPIT. CLICK ONE.
Built from your notes.
A widget is a view on your own prose: plans, streaks, datasets your notes already contain.
Minutes on task · week 32
Loss curve · run 41
plateauing — nudge the lr?
Sessions · 11 weeks
- Mon — 40 min, GAE by hand. Third time it clicked.
Curio in every widget.
“Make this weekly” is a sentence, not a settings hunt.
Your tools, streamed in.
Connector tiles stay live, and say so when a source goes quiet.
▲#build — Slack
8DLAST SYNC 8 DAYS AGO — RECONNECT?
Draw a room. Give it a rule.
Notes, Builds, widgets and live outputs all sit on one infinite table. Draw a region around some of them, write down how you want that material handled, and everything that runs inside obeys.
Every room has a rule.
A cluster carries standing instructions. One source through one recipe comes out differently in a different room.
Transformer attention — raw notes
· every token attends to every other, no recurrence
· softmax(Q·Kᵀ / √d)
· O(n²), fully parallel
Build · rebuilt weekly
widget · live
Attention lets a sequence model weigh every token against every other in a single parallel operation — the mechanism that displaced recurrence as the backbone of sequence modelling.
Self-attention derives three projections of each token — query, key, and value — and scores every query against every key through scaled dot-product attention.
The machine is a file.
A recipe is a .recipe.mdx file in your workspace: named ports, a prompt, yours to edit.
--- name: Synthesize handler: opencode inputs: - { id: notes, type: markdown, label: Notes, multi: true } - { id: angle, type: text, label: Angle } output: markdown ---
Ask the board.
Curio answers onto the canvas. New tiles arrive ringed and unaccepted, and nothing lands until you say so.
Both papers assume one cache per head. The tension is whether that survives grouped-query.
Nobody cites it, and it contradicts the scaling claim both of these lean on.
Meet Curio. Or bring your own.
One agent works every room, and it remembers you. Prefer your own? Claude Code, Codex, and a real terminal are built in.
DRAG TO SPIN — HE’S RESTLESS
Curio, resident
Orchestrates notes → Builds → dashboards → canvas. Carries your memory: gold standards, profile, any .md you hand it.
Reading logs and the canvas cluster — brief coming up.
The table opens on the gap, not the total — you missed Thursday.
Deadlifts are the only lift that moved — pull-ups held flat.
So: Thursday or Friday. Pick one and week 33 is a five-week run.
Your keys, your models
A real terminal in the shell. Run Claude Code or Codex against your workspace: it’s all just files to them too.
Your world, streamed in.
Connectors don’t sync to someone’s cloud. They write plain files into your workspace, where you, Curio, and every agent you bring can read them.
It’s all just files.
Open the folder behind your workspace and there’s no database and no proprietary format. Every note, recipe, and Build is a file you can read, rewrite, or throw away. Which means the software itself is yours to change.
A note is just MDX; one tag drops a live, draggable experiment into the sentence: the same living figures Builds use, inside your own prose.
Open the same folder in VS Code, Obsidian, or a terminal. Edits show up in Noteshell, and Noteshell’s edits are ordinary diffs you can put under git.
Jot a word in a note, ask Curio to fill it in, and the dataset, the dashboard tiles, and the Build all update. No code touched.
Nothing starts from zero.
Every note links back. Concepts grow a spine across your workspace. Ask a question and the whole neighborhood answers.
Linked, not filed.
Every [[wikilink]] is an edge. Notes find each other across folders, with no filing required.
- Links, both ways.
- Backlinks and the Links rail keep every note aware of who mentions it.
- Concepts grow a spine.
- Ideas that recur get harvested into one place. Curio notices before you do.
- Recall, in chat.
- Ask about attention and the kv-cache note answers too. Memory is retrieval, not a graph to tend.
A workspace, surveyed.
98 notes, 129 links, 10 clusters. Hover a note to light its neighborhood, drag it to feel what holds it.
Where Noteshell is headed.
SHIPPING NOW
macOS desktop app · Notes editor · Canvas · Dashboards · Builds · Curio, resident agent · Web clipper · MCPs & connectors
IN PROGRESS
Windows support · Signed releases · Notes review
UP NEXT
Notes sync · Note history & diffs · Web app · CLI
Your work will change. So will the software.
Free while in beta. Your files, your keys, your machine. Leave your address and we’ll send the build the day it opens.