Second Brain

Second Brain is my private, password-protected reading and research desk. A source-neutral Markdown knowledge base sits underneath it, so the material remains usable on desktop, iPhone, and outside the app.

Raw evidence stays separate from compiled knowledge. Safari and news briefs live under news/raw; Readwise articles, podcasts, and PDF briefs under library/raw; and sources, concepts, entities, maps, and comparisons under knowledge/wiki. Stable note IDs, provenance, and [[wikilinks]] preserve the path back to the original material.

The interface follows the way I research:

• What’s New and Library keep fast-moving news apart from durable reading.
• Dossiers and storylines assemble linked notes into narratives with references and related material.
• Grounded Ask answers from compiled, provenance-resolved notes rather than dumping the raw archive into a prompt.
• Topic exploration combines search, maps, comparisons, and a treemap to expose clusters across the knowledge base.

The Next.js app generates a versioned research index during development and deployment. Markdown remains the source of truth; the index makes thousands of files practical on Vercel. Mobile navigation, safe-area handling, and refresh-on-resume make it usable as an installed iPhone app rather than a desktop archive squeezed onto a small screen.