ragtrain is a not-quite-acronym for retrieval-augmented train of thought!
The goal of ragtrain is to make it as easy as possible to capture anything which comes to mind, and to quickly find it later.
There is a place and time for the structured and categorised, the tags and the folders, the refactoring and the editing. Most note-taking tools are designed for this very purpose! ragtrain is not.
Rather, it is for the raw and unvarnished thoughts that come to you in the shower, or while you're out for a walk. It is for the thoughts that you don't want to lose, but aren't worth organising in the moment.
Two key principles:
- Speed is a quality in its own right! Every friction point is an opportunity to lose a thought.
- Retrieval and generation are two sides of the same coin! No thought starts on a blank page, and the job of a note-taking tool is to help you follow your own train of thought.
To these ends, ragtrain consists of two parts: an append-only log of thoughts, and a semantic search engine to find them later. The punchline is that in the vein of notational velocity, both searching and appending start from the same place, and they occur keystroke-by-keystroke!