An LLM wiki changed how I work

Casey Newton: Given how often I switch apps, the best test for whether something actually makes me more productive is longevity. Do I install the app on a new machine? Do I renew the subscription when it's time? Can I point to the places where it actually saves me time?

Casey Newton: Each morning, I write a bit about whatever's on my mind. Then, I add notable news links from Techmeme to the bottom of my journal and tag them. The result is that when I'm writing a story or preparing for a podcast, I can click a tag like 'Labor' and instantly see all the stories I've saved on that subject since I started building this system a couple years ago. I used to spend a lot of time digging through databases or running fruitless Google searches in an effort to jog my memory about something I had read; Capacities ensures that it's all just a click away.

Casey Newton: It worked well enough, but I couldn't turn it into a habit. The search feature in the database itself is a simple keyword-based search; agentic search takes place on one of the app's many other surfaces; and the agent often failed to cite its sources without additional prompting. It worked, but it was effortful. Ultimately, though, even this system asked a bit too much of me. As the number of blips proliferated, my ability to consistently track stories across all of them waned. This, in turn, made me more reluctant to create new blips.

Casey Newton: How does this make me more productive? I've found it highly useful in fast-evolving, complex cases like the OpenAI / Hugging Face agentic breach, where we learned a little more about the story every few days for a matter of weeks. Each day as I prepared to write, or podcast, or go on someone else's podcast, I would pull up the page and refresh my memory — while also opening up the original sources to make sure nothing I was about to say was hallucinated.