A lot of builders are vibe-coding their own personal knowledge bases / “second brains” these days. For several I’ve met, this is their most ambitious side-project, even hoping to ship it as a product.
I’m guilty of this myself. Been gradually building for 2.5 years now. Use it continuously. It feeds on my email and calendar; notes and todo-lists; social media; phone call records and messages; and journal entries for every day all the way back to 2011. The system deduplicates and normalizes entities and connects them in a graph. Semantic search and embeddings across it all. An MCP interface to query it from Claude. Automated and authenticated connections into a range of sources and exports in various formats.
I reach for this system dozens of times a day. It is an incredible resource for me and the way I work.
And that’s the big realization: this is a system built for me and how I work. It makes me better at being me. It is unlikely to fit anyone else’s ways of working or thinking.
This realization is quite liberating. Now that I accept that it is a system for me, I build it differently, I maintain it differently. I build out features that are just for me without thinking that they won’t be useful (or fun) for anyone else.
Coming to terms with building for an audience of one should not be a disappointment. It’s a sign of a future where we all customize and tweak the software and systems we use to run our lives.
P.S. I wrote more broadly about software for an audience of one here.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.