Stanford CS / AI @ Coinbase / NYC

Catching My Drift

A tool to think with. Speak a messy word dump and see your ideas laid out as a map, in your own words.

The my drift welcome page: a sample map of three topics, each with the exact quote it came from

Talking and writing are linear, but my thinking isn’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot about voice, interfaces, and tools to think. I talk back and forth with chatbots all the time now, and I’ve been struck by how much more I get across by speaking. Talking is cheap, so I say a lot more, including the doubts, hesitations and tangents I would have filtered out when writing.

Reading back through my Wispr Flow dumps, I found a lot of nuance and good ideas. Then I watched the AI summaries squash them flat. My raw words were often better than anything rephrased, and every time an AI summarized my own ideas back to me, I lost a lot of the sauce.

I wanted a tool to think with. My messy word dumps and non-linear thoughts, laid out in space, so I can play with them, develop my ideas and see my thinking.

Features

1The mapThe current landscape of my thinking. I don’t want to reread everything I said. I want to see the whole landscape, then drill down where things are interesting or underdeveloped. Every topic holds the exact words it came from.

2Idea lineageHow my thinking on the same idea changes over time. Some opinions shift, some stay the same, and I forget a lot of what I said. Lineage keeps every version, so a good way of putting something never gets lost. Semantic search across all my maps also surfaces ideas that look unrelated but are the same idea in a different setting, even when I never made the connection myself.

3ChallengesWhen I contradict myself, say something worth expanding, or make a good, unusual take, the map flags it and prompts me to talk about it more.