wordspaceThe idea
The space of words that grow and relate to one another.
wordspace is the space where your words grow and relate to one another. Not an archive: a fabric that forms by itself, as you write.
Why tidying shouldn't be your job
Taking notes is easy. Finding them again, linking them, noticing that two notes contradict each other — that is the work no one has time for. wordspace does it for you, as you write. You think in notes; the intelligence, entirely on your Mac, re-reads them and organizes them by topic, people and ideas.
None of the model's words enter your wiki: only what you write does. The model observes; it does not dictate.
The same holds for what arrives from outside. A voice note caught in the street, a prompt the app suggests: they stay beside your note, readable, but they don't become your thinking. What enters the wiki is what you write after passing through them.
How it works
Every time you save, a local engine re-reads the new or changed notes and updates the map.
The loop closes: when you answer a contradiction or capture a prompt, what you write comes back in as a note. The system doesn't hand you back what you know — it makes you write what you didn't know you thought.
Three numbers
Contradictions are not hunted by the model: they are hunted by the code, and the model steps in only where understanding a language is required. It is the design choice that makes everything else possible, and it is measured.
Zero false alarms in 18,000 casesThe deterministic comparison of facts — amounts, dates, quantities — produced 7,333 flags in six languages without a single mistake. It doesn't depend on which model you installed: it's code.2.73 GB in memoryLess than a browser with a dozen tabs. Everything fits inside: extraction, rules, judgement, summaries, search.144 chances to invent a number, none takenHalf the test questions had no answer in the notes. Neither model answered anyway.The full study also says where the system doesn't hold: the measurements, in full. →
Benefits
Entirely local
No cloud, no account, no tracking. Your texts never leave the Mac.
It takes the tidying, not the thinking
Topics, people and links emerge from the notes. You don't build the structure — you find it already made. The time saved goes back where it's needed.
Thinking in dialogue
The wiki shows you the contradictions between things you wrote at different times, and asks you positioning questions. Not answers: questions.
It matures over time
The more you write, the denser the web. Knowledge doesn't pile up — it connects.
It stays yours
Your texts are Markdown, an open, non-proprietary format: what you write is what gets saved, with no hidden fields and no closed formats. The wiki pages are readable files in the app's folder, and the app keeps a history of your notes' earlier versions.
Every claim carries its source
Quotations are checked character by character against your notes before they appear. The ones that don't hold are stopped.
What it isn't
wordspace is not an assistant that works in your place. It will hand you contradictions to resolve and uncomfortable questions, and neither resolves itself.
Nor is it an archive that merely stores. It notices when you change your mind, when an external source is silent on exactly what matters to you, when a concept recurs often enough to deserve its own page.
It's a tool to think better, not to hoard more. The sign that it's working isn't that it seems clever: it's when it shows you a friction that bothers you.
A friction, though, only bothers you if it is real. An invented contradiction is as irritating as a real one, and after the second or third you stop looking at any of them. That is why, in our work, precision matters more than how much you find: a conflict you miss costs an opportunity, a conflict you invent costs the tool.
The name says it: wordspace is the space of words — where words grow and relate to one another.
References
- Vannevar Bush — As We May Think (1945). Imagines the Memex, a desk that stores books and notes and lets you bind them together into associative trails. The insight that matters isn't the storage: it's that the value lies not in the documents but in the links a person draws between them, and that those trails should be preserved like the material itself.
- Niklas Luhmann — Communicating with Slip Boxes (1992). Describes the Zettelkasten with which he wrote dozens of books: short cards, each with one idea, linked to one another instead of filed by topic. The point is that the structure isn't designed in advance — it emerges from the links. And the archive, once grown large enough, becomes an interlocutor that returns juxtapositions you hadn't foreseen.
- Sönke Ahrens — How to Take Smart Notes (2017). Brings Luhmann's method back to daily practice. The useful distinction is between fleeting notes, notes on what you read, and permanent notes written in your own words: only the last count, because rephrasing is already thinking. Taking notes isn't for remembering, it's for forcing yourself to understand.
- Joon Sung Park et al. — Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior (2023). Introduces reflection: the agent doesn't just accumulate observations, but periodically re-reads them and synthesizes higher-level beliefs. It's the difference between a memory that grows and one that consolidates — and the recognition that without that step, volume smothers meaning.
- Andrej Karpathy — llm-wiki (2026). Proposes compiling notes just once into a wiki of linked pages that the model maintains, instead of retrieving fragments at every question. The model reads, distills, updates and flags conflicts; knowledge accumulates instead of being rediscovered each time. The markdown stays readable so the person can check what the model wrote.