The best thing I wrote in 2019 was a chorus I didn't know I'd written.

It was sitting in a file called Drafts and Ideas.md, wedged between two paragraphs of ordinary prose about ordinary days. No title, no label, typed entirely in caps. Past-me used caps to flag that something was something, which is either a hint left for the dummy in the future or evidence of the dummy in the past. I found it seven years later while dragging a decade of notes out of flat files and way too many note-taking apps. It's part of the lyrics for a song I'm working on now, for an EP that will exist soon.

I love capturing notes. Fragments, overheard lines, half-arguments, things I notice on planes and trains while the world blurs by. I love the moment two of them turn out to be the same idea in different clothes, and the more unrelated the sources, the more interesting the connection.

Matt Ridley gave a talk at TEDGlobal in 2010 called "When Ideas Have Sex." His argument is that progress doesn't run on individual genius…it runs on exchange. Ideas meet other ideas and produce offspring neither parent could have produced alone.

The same thing happens inside one head. Your 2019 self and your 2026 self are two different people occupying a shared brain, and when their ideas meet, that's exchange. The problem is they almost never meet, because you can't get them in the same room.

So this summer I did the unglamorous thing. Eleven years of notes, 2014 through 2025, out of everywhere and into one folder. Not a fancy organized system with tags and nested folders. Just one folder with markdown, plain text, and random snippets.

The chorus that I mentioned at the top of this post surfaced in the first week. So did a resolutions list from 2018 with the entry: Songs to Record [[Future EP]]. Wiki-link syntax, double brackets, written years before most tools supported them. Past-me was building a link graph by hand, in an app that had no idea what he was doing, on the assumption that someone would eventually come along and connect it. Five songs now, written in the Pacific Northwest over six months.

The reason it happened is that I now have something to help me, and all it needed was a simple prompt and a quality AI model.

For as long as anyone has kept notes, a note's value was capped by the odds you'd ever reread it, and those odds got worse with every note you added. Volume worked against you. Retrieval and synthesis stopped scaling with your attention.

I think an old pile of notes is worth more now than it has ever been, and I don't think many people have noticed yet. The pile compounds now instead of decaying, and every note you wrote in 2014 is worth more today than it was the day you wrote it.

One important thing to leave you with…models lack taste. They'll hand you fifty connections that are technically true and completely dead, and it can't tell you which one matters, because that judgment is made of everything you've ever loved and been embarrassed by, and none of that is in the pile.

It didn't write that chorus. It didn't know it was a chorus! It flagged an oddly-shaped block of text between two prose entries and asked what it was, which is what a good editor does and what I'd failed to do on every occasion I must have scrolled past it. I read four lines and knew.

Everyone has the same models. Nobody else has your pile. In the words of Logan Roy, "make your own fucking pile."