AI made me ship faster... but it broke my journaling
Something weird happened after I started building with AI.
My output exploded.
With tools like Claude Code I can ship 10+ features in a day.
But when someone asked what I worked on last week… I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Not clearly, anyway.
Because the thinking behind the work was disappearing.
My journals used to help with that. But AI quietly broke them.
Instead of being a record of my thinking, they became a weird mix of:
• fragments of thoughts
• copy-pasta AI chats
• polished summaries of messy work
And another problem showed up:
I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with the pace of building.
So most of the reasoning behind decisions never made it into the journal. At best they were in oddly named "plan" markdown files.
I tried the usual “second brain” tools:
Obsidian. Reflect. A few others.
They’re powerful, but they all push you toward organizing thinking instead of capturing it.
Plugins, tags, markdown, systems.
By the time something lands in the notes, it’s already been filtered and cleaned up.
But the interesting stuff usually happens before the thinking becomes polished.
So I tried something different.
Instead of typing journals, I started recording short video logs of my thinking and activities throughout the day.
Just stream-of-consciousness.
Then AI transcribes and indexes everything so I can search it later.
The result surprised me.
When I typed journals, I captured about 65k words per year.
With video + AI transcription, I’m capturing ~85k words per month.
That’s about 15× more thinking preserved.
And it includes things that never show up in typed journals:
• false starts
• half-formed ideas
• reasoning behind decisions
• context around experiments
That experiment turned into something I’m building now: Historic.
The idea is simple:
A tool that lets builders record their thinking in real time and turn it into a searchable archive of the journey.
Not a productivity system.
Not a second brain.
More like a personal history of building something.
Still early.
But I’m curious if other builders are running into the same thing:
AI is accelerating the work… but the thinking behind the work is disappearing.
How are you documenting what you’re building these days?
This is actually incredible. Would you recommend this for people outside the SaaS industry? Like copywriters for example?
We've heard from a few early users that although it isn't made for content creators, they are finding it especially helpful for their work. It's helpful for writing copy that doesn't feel like an AI generated it.