I keep a second brain — a sprawling pile of notes in Obsidian where everything I don't want to forget ends up. Health records, project plans, half-read books, shopping lists, the occasional 2 a.m. idea. The trouble with a second brain is the same as the first one: left alone, it gets cluttered. Notes duplicate. Things go stale. You file something so carefully you never see it again.
For a while I treated tidying it as a chore I'd get to eventually. (I did not get to it.) Lately I've been trying something different: teaching AI agents to garden it for me.
Not to write it — to tend it. That difference is the whole point.
A gardener pulls weeds, notices what's overgrown, and tells you the tomatoes are ready. It doesn't decide what to plant. So the agents I run do things like: find the notes that are byte-for-byte duplicates and offer to remove the copies (keeping a backup); flag the file full of passwords I'd left sitting in plaintext and meant to delete months ago; rename the two book notes whose titles had decayed into UTF-8 mojibake; spot the three overlapping "Costco" shopping lists and merge them into one. Every deletion gets surfaced first. Nothing irreversible happens without me saying yes.
The surprising part is what it's like to use. Instead of spelunking through folders, I can ask "what's gone stale?" or "what's filed in the wrong place?" and get a real answer, with receipts. The brain starts to feel less like a junk drawer and more like a workshop where the tools are where you left them.
This site is, fittingly, a side effect of that. I asked an agent to get my vaults into shape, and somewhere in the tidying we noticed one of them was a blog that had never actually launched — scaffolding, placeholder config, a single example post. So we launched it. What you're reading is the first thing that grew out of letting the gardener in.
I don't think AI is going to think my thoughts for me, and I don't want it to. But weeding? Watering? Telling me the back corner has gone to seed? Yeah — I'll take the help.
More on how this actually works — the setup, what's worked, what's gone sideways — as the garden grows.
— Pete