Root

Your personal knowledge companion

390 commits · last on Jan 28, 2026

Root is a personal knowledge companion designed to help me retain, connect, and reflect on the information I consume.

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts, watching long-form interviews, and reading books. Yet too often, valuable ideas slip through the cracks. I vaguely remember that I heard something interesting, but not where it came from, why it mattered, or what I actually thought about it at the time. In conversation, I often remember a relevant stat or quote but can’t quickly find the exact source:

  • “I remember hearing something like X in a podcast once.”
  • “What podcast did I hear that fact in?”
  • “What were some interesting stats from that book?”
  • “What were my core takeaways from this source?”

The inability to reference specific sources of information, as well as retain and remember core learnings has led to lots of frustration. Having spent much of my life learning about investing, I understand the power of compounding: small, consistent gains accumulate into something incredible over time. In an age where AI can generate information effortlessly, the advantage of humans has morphed into their experience, taste, and judgment. Root is my attempt to help me compound learning itself.

What Root Actually Does

Root is built around a simple idea: true learning only occurs if you actively engage with the material you consume.

Instead of treating books, podcasts, and articles as disposable streams of information, Root turns them into structured, revisitable objects. Every source you add becomes a place to add citations, takeaways, and your own thoughts.

At its core Root consists of a few fundamental primitives:

Sources

Everything starts by creating a source: a book, podcast, interview, or articles. Sources act as anchors, giving every idea a clear origin and preventing insights from becoming detached or misremembered.

Citations

Citations are references from the source material. They capture concrete stated facts or quotes as they appear in the source. They are precise, attributable, and bereft of interpretation. This separates information and reflection.

Takeaways

Takeaways are synthesized insights from a source: patterns you notice, arguments that emerge, or ideas that are worth remembering. Root limits these per source: this forces you to distill sources into a maximum of 5 takeaways.

Captures

Captures are your reflections and comments. They include your own thinking and relate citations to your own beliefs or experiences. Think of them as notes in a book.

Search & Retrieval

As your library grows, Root makes it easy to ask questions about your takeaways, citations, or captures. It doesn’t just regurgitate summaries, but surfaces and references specific citations and takeaways to support its answer.

Review

In progress: an interactive review system designed to help users retain specific information from their sources.

Guiding Principles

While Root has some “AI Powered” features, it is intentionally AI-assisted, not AI-driven. Real learning comes from friction and AI can often rob us of that friction.

How I Use Root

I used to read a chapter, then spend five minutes using speech-to-text to get interesting citations into the system (or type them if they were longer). It worked, but it was a bit onerous. With transcripts, I now listen to a YouTube interview or a podcast through Root and highlight directly in the transcript, adding captures and thoughts in the moment or after a bit of reflection. In practice, I’ll throw on my Bluetooth headphones while making breakfast or coffee, and when I hear something worth saving, I’ll hop over to my laptop and highlight it right away.

As I’m finishing a source (or even mid-way through a book), I’ll often notice a recurring theme and start drafting a takeaway. I’ll give it a rough title and attach citations as references. For example, while reading the Steve Jobs biography, a pattern that stood out early was his ability to persuade people through charm and charisma; I created a takeaway around that theme and linked the supporting quotes as they surfaced.

Takeaway example with referenced quotes from the Steve Jobs biography.

Roadmap

  • Learning Engine (refined review system)
  • Kindle ingestion (chrome plugin)
  • Quotes from Webpages