Published: 2026-01-25
Twenty years of journaling, note-taking apps, and personal knowledge management systems. Twenty years of starting strong, using something religiously for months, then inexplicably dropping it.
Obsidian. LogSeq. Paper journals in every size. I lasted a year with LogSeq, my personal record, before it collected dust like everything else. Not because I decided to quit. Because friction killed my momentum.
Every note-taking system promises frictionless capture. They all lie. The friction isn't in capturing the note—it's in everything after.
Where does this note go? What metadata should I add? How do I link it to the source? Do I type the author's name manually or copy-paste it? Is this book already in my system, or do I need to create a new entry?
These micro-decisions compound. Each one is a tiny tax on your willpower. Eventually, you stop paying.
Instead of fighting friction, I eliminated it. I built SlipBot, an AI agent that handles all the organizational overhead for me.
Now my workflow is dead simple: Type /note "content" "optional source" and press enter. The agents do everything else. If the source already exists in my knowledge graph, they match it automatically. If it doesn't, they hit the Google Books API for an exact match (case-insensitive), pull the author and title, and add it to the graph.
The graph currently lives in JSON. This won't scale indefinitely, I'm adding database support with proper indexing so queries stay fast as the collection grows. But it's operational right now, available on GitHub under GPL-3.
SlipBot is a work in progress. The database migration is coming. There are probably bugs. But it works, and it's already doing the job I built it for: removing every excuse I had for not taking notes.
If you want features, tell me. If you find bugs, open an issue. If you just want to use it, clone it and go.