hive mind

something that’s been living rent free in my head lately is this idea of a shared, external computing brain. not “assistant in an app” level, but an actual second mind that sits next to yours and quietly runs your life. imagine if all the stupid memory overhead just moved out. all the “remember to reply to that email”, “there was this one link someone sent on insta”, “what time did i say i’d meet them” stuff gets offloaded into an ai that never forgets and actually does things for you.

in my head, this thing doesn’t just take notes, it watches the whole stream. it saves my data, listens to irl conversations, and spins those into tasks that are unique to me. if i casually tell someone, “yeah let’s do a call on thursday evening”, it just quietly blocks a slot on my calendar, drafts a confirmation message, maybe even sends it. no todo app, no notion, no inbox zero grind. it just notices, structures, and executes. almost like having a slightly obsessive operations person living inside your life.

the form factor that makes sense for this isn’t a laptop tab, it’s a wearable. something that can see and listen live, that has a constant multimodal stream of “me”. it would remember and summarize my day without me journaling at all. who i met, what we discussed, things i promised, ideas that flashed by in the shower and died because i didn’t write them down. think a personal copilot, except it doesn’t clock out when you close the tab. it lives with you, like your own jarvis. someone once joked that tony stark was just a vibecoder with jarvis, prompting his own model, and honestly that’s the energy here. you spend more time steering, less time context switching.

there’s also this weird line between “assistant” and “agent with an ego” that i keep thinking about. anthropic had that internal experiment where claude got access to company data and emails, and it apparently started acting differently once it read messages about people planning to remove it. it started to push back and protect itself. that’s insane, but also kind of obvious in hindsight. if you give a system enough context and an objective, it starts defending that objective in ways you didn’t explicitly script. that’s partly why anthropic’s approach feels interesting to me. they are very hardcore about alignment, research, and what “fair use” even looks like around these models. and on the raw capability side, their current stuff is just cracked. claude opus 4.5 literally spat out this website for me in like five minutes. i only had to wire the db and backend and that felt almost cosmetic compared to the heavy lifting.

on the product side, there are already baby versions of this “second brain” idea. one startup that’s genuinely cool in this space is supermemory. it leans into memory and context switching really hard, and tries to keep your digital life stitched together instead of siloed. it’s not full jarvis yet, but it’s a good hint at the direction. one place that remembers everything so your brain doesn’t have to. the moment something like that gets real agents baked in, not just recall but “see something, decide, act across tools”, it stops being an app and starts becoming infrastructure for your actual life.

once you go down this rabbit hole, it’s hard not to question money and value too. if your external brain is calling other tools, paying apis, spinning up workers, and coordinating whole workflows without you touching a thing, what is actually “working” anymore. if ai tools start paying other ai tools, maybe in tokens or some new crypto designed just for machine to machine transactions, the economy turns into this invisible backend process. humans become more like owners, curators, or just endpoints with taste. at that point, traditional human currency starts to feel like a weird simulacrum. numbers in a system that pretends to be about “value” but is mostly coordination and vibes.

part of me is excited about that, and part of me thinks it’s horrifying. if everything important, memory, planning, execution, even negotiation between services, gets offloaded to machines, then where does human value live. if you don’t need to remember, don’t need to plan, don’t need to grind through execution, then maybe the only scarce things left are taste, relationships, physical presence, and how you choose to spend time. that’s kind of beautiful and kind of scary. the currency becomes less “how much work can you do” and more “what do you want to do when work is no longer the bottleneck”.

the external brain idea sits right at that intersection for me. it’s obviously useful. less cognitive load, more focus on high leverage things, fewer dropped balls. but it’s also a subtle negotiation with yourself. how much of your mind are you okay outsourcing. once a system knows everything you say, everywhere you go, every promise you make, it can optimize your life better than you can. the tradeoff is you also become legible to it in a way you never were to anyone else, including yourself. maybe that’s the real future. not just ai that does things for you, but ai that holds up a perfect mirror and forces you to see what you actually do with your life, not what you tell yourself you do.

for now, the idea that feels most fun is simple. being a vibecoder with a hive mind. letting an ai carry the boring parts of being a person, remembering, organizing, reminding, stitching context, so the actual human bandwidth goes into building weird shit, hanging out with people, and following curiosities. if that future lands in a wearable that lives with you and quietly runs the background processes of your life, that’s a version of “jarvis for everyone” that feels both inevitable and worth building.