A second brain you never have to file

Every second brain dies the same death. The system is sound, the first week is glorious, and then a busy Tuesday happens and nothing gets filed — and a second brain you have stopped feeding is just a folder of last month. The problem was never the method. It is that capture is a chore, and chores lose.

Minne removes the chore. It watches the work you were doing anyway — the text of the windows you work in, never a picture of your screen — and an AI agent distils it into a wiki of plain markdown in ~/Minne: one page per person, project and topic, updated every half hour, each page citing the raw captures it came from. You write nothing down. It is already written down.

A second brain only works if it is maintained, and it is only trustworthy if you can read it. A self-maintaining wiki in plain markdown is the version that survives contact with a busy week.

The folder

~/Minne/
  SCHEMA.md          the rules of the wiki — yours, never rewritten
  index.md           the map: every page, one line each
  sources/           raw captures, append-only, masked before disk
  wiki/
    ingrid-berg.md   a person
    oslo-move.md     a project
    daily/           one page per day
    style/           how you write, per context

Wiki pages link with [[wikilinks]], carry flat frontmatter, and cite their sources down to the snapshot. Raw captures expire after 90 days by default; the distilled wiki never does. Every file and field is documented in Your memory folder.

You own the schema

The agent maintains the wiki, but the contract it works to — SCHEMA.md — is yours, written once by Minne and never touched again. Tell it what is never worth a page (recruiter mail, newsletters), how projects should be named, which sections a page must carry, which folders are hands-off. The PARA-or-Zettelkasten argument dissolves rather pleasingly: whatever your method, write it in the schema and the librarian follows it. Steering with SCHEMA.md shows the edits worth making.

Grep it, git it, leave anytime

~/Minne is an Obsidian vault as it stands — the wikilinks, daily notes and frontmatter were designed to resolve the way Obsidian resolves them. It is plain enough to grep, and putting it under git gives you a diffable history of what the agent changed. Other AI tools can read it too: Minne serves the memory read-only over MCP to Claude Desktop or any MCP client.

And because the memory is files, leaving is copying a folder. No export button, no lock-in — the wiki outlives the app, which is exactly the right order of priority. If that idea is new, what is a personal AI memory? makes the longer argument.

What it costs

Minne is free and MIT-licensed. The intelligence is a model you bring: an API key from Anthropic or OpenAI, Ollama on your own machine — in which case nothing leaves it — or a Claude/ChatGPT subscription sign-in. There is no Minne account, no Minne server, and no Minne subscription; the provider guide lays out the trade-offs. macOS 14 and later. Download it and let the filing do itself. And because the memory is files, it is not locked to Minne: any MCP client — Claude Desktop, say — can read the same folder.

Free, open source, and yours to read. macOS 14 and later.