Carrel

Capture is not the problem. The problem comes four months later, when a deadline moves or a final paper needs the reading you annotated in September — and the answer is in a notebook, a thread, a PDF, a recording, or a message to yourself. Somewhere.

Notes apps store text you have to remember you wrote. Chat assistants forget you between sessions. Neither can answer what did I say about this after the fact. It is a retrieval problem rather than a filing problem, and that distinction decided everything that followed.

Capture has to be nearer than the notes app or it does not happen, so anything goes in through whichever door is closest — a message to a bot, an upload, a whole folder, a pasted link, a lecture recording, or a git hook that fires on every commit I make on this machine without being asked. Everything is embedded on the way in.

What comes back out is four surfaces: a Brief for the day, a Plan for the week and the term, a Calendar that imports from Google and proposes rather than writes, and a Library that is both the search across everything and the place new things go in.

The week is drawn as seven day-tracks rather than a list of start times. “09:00 MGMT 275” says when a class begins and nothing about how much of the day it eats, so a fifty-minute class and an eighty-minute one printed identically and the week could not answer whether Wednesday afternoon was free. Every class and timed event is now placed where it starts and drawn as long as it runs.

There are two ways into the corpus and they are deliberately not the same. Carrel reads Postgres directly, because a UI needs rows. Every other AI assistant reads through the MCP server, which fences what it returns — text coming back out of a memory is untrusted input to whatever model asked for it, and that is the wrong shape for a screen but the right one for a model.

I designed and built the launch page as well, including the art. The brain and the spine are point clouds generated from a mesh rather than stock illustration — 24,000 stipple points in the hero alone — and every one of those positions is computed offline by a small pipeline of geometry scripts and shipped as data, so the page draws the art without ever calculating it. Keeping it abstract was deliberate: a photoreal brain reads as uncanny, and the thing being sold is a memory rather than an organ.

The page itself is generated rather than hand-written. I edit one template and a build script writes the HTML and its three assets from it, because the deployment serves a content security policy that permits no inline style or script — an inline block is dropped silently by the browser rather than failing anything, so the build asserts that none survive. Three harnesses then check the result instead of me looking at it, and the strictest ends by stripping the page’s head back off and asserting that five of its eleven checks now fail on the broken copy. Without that control one of them passed either way, which is to say it was measuring nothing.