Work/Platforms

Commonplace

Commonplace takes any link you share from your phone or Mac, reads it, and files a summary into a private notebook you can search and ask questions of.

Private buildiOSmacOSWeb

Commonplace inbox listing saved links, newest first, grouped by day.
  1. 01Save a link and it lands in the inbox. The newest item is a sourdough article.
  2. 02A sample summary: why it matters, and key points. It was written by hand for this demo, not by a model.
  3. 03Each item is filed into the wiki, with topic pages that gather related items. The text here is seeded sample content.
  4. 04The Sourdough page sums up what three saved items agree on. The text is seeded sample content.
  5. 05Search for "tide". Three saved items match, and the matching word is in bold.

Sample data

What it does

Share an article, a tweet, a podcast, or a screenshot, and Commonplace reads it and writes a short note. The note lands in a private collection of plain text pages, next to pages for the topics and companies it mentions. On the Mac, one key chord saves whatever is on the clipboard. A notice arrives when the note is ready.

The point is reading it back later. Search finds a note by its words or by what it means. Ask answers a question from your own notes and numbers its sources. Dig deeper starts from one page, goes looking for more, and writes a short brief onto that page.

Hard problem we solved

Keeping the queue moving when free models run out

Summaries come from free hosted models, and free models have daily limits. Once a limit fills, every item saved after it would fail, and a failed item is a link that never gets read.

We built a provider chain. The phone tries first, reading screenshots and PDFs on the device and writing a first summary when it can. Then come two free hosted models, then a second free provider. Claude sits at the end and runs only if the owner turns it on. A cleaner checks each answer and moves to the next provider if the answer fails. A quota error does not fail the item. It stays in the queue and retries when the daily limit resets, and a local guard stops spend before the cap. A usage meter shows how much of the day's allowance is gone.

The long jobs get the same patience. Dig deeper runs as a resumable job, and a five-minute cron restarts any run that stopped. The wiki writer merges new text into pages with markers around its own sections, so a hand edit survives the next nightly rewrite, and it commits text and images through the git API.

CapturePhone, Mac, email, webWorkerHono, pipeline, cronModel chainFree models firstMedia serviceVideo and audio textD1 and VectorizeItems, search, vectorsR2Raw pages, assetsWiki repoMarkdown files

Where it stands

A private build for one person's use, with no public sign-up.

FamilyHub wall board

A tablet on the kitchen wall that keeps a busy household on the same page.

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