Mining Your Life for Context

LLMs make a lot of life searchable, from meeting transcripts to iMessages to half-formed morning thoughts, but all this context only helps if you know what you want to achieve. Today, we’re revisiting how AI entrepreneur Noah Brier uses Claude Code as a second brain to sharpen and expand his own ideas, Every head of growth Austin Tedesco shares how Codex helped him spot the interruptions crowding out deeper work, and we offer a workflow for mining your scattered past insights into a coherent draft.

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Spotlight

Noah Brier, AI entrepreneur and seer

Brier is a true AI early adopter. The cofounder of the AI consultancy Alephic, Brier was all in on using Claude Code as a “second brain” for knowledge work back when most people still viewed the tool as a place to write code.

In September, Brier told Dan Shipper on our podcast, AI & I, how he turned the coding app into a research, thinking, and writing partner by connecting it to thousands of his personal notes. Since then, he’s started thinking beyond

his own productivity—how does AI make it easier or harder for an entire organization to stay working toward the same goal? For that, he has a new framework, announced in Every last week, that he calls the “pace layers” of AI engineering, drawn from Stewart Brand’s system for describing how different parts of society change at different speeds.

Just as hooking up Claude Code to an ocean of personal information requires you to determine what is—and isn’t—worth surfacing, running a successful AI company relies on human judgment. Similarly, AI makes code free to produce, but it doesn’t make it easier to identify a product people actually want or orient an entire system of humans and agents around that vision.

Read Brier’s essay on the framework he uses to achieve alignment and then watch his AI & I episode on YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Data point

671

That’s the number of times per day iMessage is active on Austin’s screen each day, according to Chronicle, Codex’s screen-context memory feature that uses screenshots to analyze your computer activity. He’d like to get that number down to 150.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

1. How Austin stays focused and what coding agent he uses to work
2. How professional writers are responding to AI
3. How to find that golden insight in your scattered meeting notes, memos, and documents