In this post over at LinkedIn, prompted by a significant increase in price for an Evernote subscription, Paul Grant asks:

So, a conundrum. Do I migrate my second brain to something open source, or do I build my own much better application tailored to my needs… because now I CAN thanks to improvements in agentic LLMs? What do you recommend?

All this leading me to surmise, are we entering the age of bespoke applications where the number of users is N=1?

I replied with the following comments.

Thanks for nerd sniping me with a topic that I find overly interesting. Given your interest in graph databases, I can definitely understand how you too have disappeared down the “second brain” rabbit hole. I do reflect sometimes that the activity of organising a digital second brain may perhaps be an act of procrastination and playing with the digital tools that we find engaging, rather than something that adds to our deep thinking. I love the idea of the digital second brain, but I feel that a lot of my best thinking happens in the head and on paper. You’ve always been an early adopter and perhaps your more enthusiastic use of the latest AI tools has assisted you to realise more value from the digital second brain concept.

I’ve been using Obsidian as my primary repository for digital notes. One of the attractive features has been the “your data is your data” approach where all of the content is stored as plain text markdown files. I suspect that I am overly averse to lock-in and subscriptions, and that the rational approach would be to make use of modern, cloud-based tools and then look at getting my data out if and when I need to.

I like using Emacs (yes, it is old school), and some of the packages people have developed on there for personal knowledge management are pretty impressive. Org mode, denote and ekg are the ones that come to mind immediately. There are also plenty of packages that support use of local or cloud based LLMs, and it is highly customisable through the underlying emacs lisp language. I have no doubt that this could be tailored to something that met your needs, particularly if you were using LLMs to help you code the customisations. Of course, it isn’t really a web native solution, but it can run on just about all platforms (including your phone), and software like syncthing can take care of synchronising between your various devices.

Another alternative to something like Evernote is Tana, which has some really cool graph inspired ways of linking and dynamically viewing your content. I note that their desktop app now has a MCP feature, which allows you to plug your second brain into your LLM / AI workflow.

Some further reflections since posting that.

My current interest in Emacs has been influenced by the Mastering Emacs site and book, as well as the wonderful content that Sacha Chua posts on her blog. I’m not sure I will ever end up at the level of emacs/life integration that Sacha manages to acheive, but it is pretty interesting to see what is possible. I’m slowly starting to add my own little elisp functions to my configuration to make my use of Emacs nicer.

I’d also call out Maggie Appleton’s site, which has a bunch of interesting content, including this article that mentioned Tana.