--- title: "A second brain: a memory of your work, kept by AI — Resona" description: "What a second brain is and how to build one: a notes folder, rules for your AI assistant and meetings that file themselves. Explained by the CTO and maker of Resona." source: https://resona-app.ru/en/second-brain/ --- # A second brain: a memory of your work, kept by AI SS Sergey Sadovikov, CTO and maker of Resona The higher your role, the more you have to remember. A meeting with a colleague you see once a month, and the first five minutes go to recalling what you talked about last time. A productive planning session, and a week later nobody remembers who promised what. I have five to eight calls a day, and memory is not my strongest side. But I do like order. So for half a year now my working memory has been kept by AI. Here is what that gives me and how it works. ## What it gives you Ten minutes before a meeting, a card appears on my screen that I did not write: what we decided last time, what I promised, what was promised to me and what is still open. Sometimes it surfaces a promise from three weeks ago that we had both forgotten. The card before a meeting in Resona: what was decided, what you promised and what is still open. - **Meeting notes write themselves.** The meeting ends, and the note is already in the folder. - **I barely have to retell the context to the AI.** I ask for a draft e-mail and get a text to a specific person that already accounts for what they promised last week. - **Tasks do not have to live in my head.** They surface by themselves, before the meeting with the right person. ## What a second brain is The idea is old: a system of notes you write for your future self. You write today so that a month later you can open them and remember. Except a month later nobody opens them: finding the right thing in your notes takes longer than asking a colleague. And in a busy week the notes are not written at all, even though that is exactly the week you will need to remember. Everything changed when notes got another reader: AI. It does not mind opening forty files before it answers, and it does not need elegant wording. It needs completeness, links and dates. Now the notes are written for the AI first, and I mostly read a short summary or simply ask. Context is worth more than hands. AI already writes the e-mail, the plan, the deck quickly. The quality depends on whether it knows what is going on in your work. ## How it is built An ordinary folder of text files and an AI assistant that works in it. Before answering, it reads the notes it needs; after a conversation, it adds what is new: meeting notes, decisions, agreements. ### Where context comes from - Meetings, recorded by Resona - Your thoughts and requests, in one line - Documents you give the assistant → ### The notes folder - meetings/ - people/ - decisions/ - plans/ - rules for the AI → ### What you get - E-mails that account for agreements - Meeting prep in a minute - An answer to “what did we promise?” One rules file at the root of the folder sets how the assistant behaves: who you are, how to work with you, where things go. Change the text and the behaviour changes. From then on you no longer decide which folder something belongs in: you tell the assistant in one line “this happened” or “do this”, and it files things itself. ## Three rules without which the memory lies - **Everything valuable goes into a file.** An analysis, a plan, a draft e-mail land as a file in the right folder straight away. A chat is lost within a week; the assistant will pull up a file by itself. - **Links.** Every note links to people, meetings and decisions. For you that is navigation; for the AI, a way to reach the right file. - **No invented precision.** AI happily rounds and fills in gaps. Once a guess gets into memory, the next answers are built on it. So the rules say plainly: not sure? Put “(?)”. ## Meetings are the main source of context Meetings bring the most context: that is where the promises are made that later get lost. For notes to appear without me, I needed a transcriber that records the sound right on the computer, works with any call without a bot among the participants and hands the text to the assistant. I did not find one, so I wrote Resona. Resona records and transcribes the meeting on the Mac and puts it into your folder as a note. The assistant files meetings by people, projects and decisions, and when you ask for an e-mail it already knows what was agreed. Your AI assistant writes an e-mail from the meetings Resona put in the folder. ## How to start in an evening In Resona it is three steps: Settings → Second brain. Pick a folder, copy the ready instruction and paste it into your AI assistant. The Second brain section in Resona’s settings. Any AI assistant that can work with files on your Mac will do. From then on, just tell it “update” and new meetings are filed by people, projects and decisions. On Free, meetings go into the folder with a button; on Pro, by themselves after every call. Assistants that support MCP can read meetings straight from Resona, without the folder. And if you would rather build it all by hand, start with an empty folder and a file with the three rules above: half an hour. Add the rest when you hit the limits. If you like to tune things, there is an [open kit](https://github.com/Sadovikow/resona-obsidian-kit) (free, MIT licence; its guide is in Russian): a ready folder structure for people, projects and decisions, an advisor role that answers from your base, and background processing of every new meeting. ## What leaves your Mac Resona records and transcribes the sound on the Mac itself: the audio never leaves the computer. The notes folder is read by the AI assistant you connected yourself: the notes’ text goes to it, and that is your call. Resona itself sends a meeting’s text only when you press “Make notes” or “Copilot”, through the Resona server to the AI model provider. The Resona server does not store the text. The details are in the [privacy policy](https://resona-app.ru/privacy.html#en). ## Start with your next call. Record a meeting and it becomes the first note of your second brain. Installing takes a minute; the speech model is already inside. [Download free for Mac](https://resona-app.ru/download/Resona.dmg) 5 meetings a month free · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon (M1 or later) Resona runs on a Mac. [Send yourself the link](https://resona-app.ru/en/#download) or, on Windows, leave your e-mail and we will write when the Windows version is out.