An assistant that does the work
before you ask.
One conversation, on my phone and my Mac
Felix is my personal assistant and chief of staff. Each morning it has a brief ready: what's on my calendar, what I said on earlier days, and who's waiting on me. I react by voice and it updates. After that comes a craft session, where I critique real app designs and Felix coaches me. Everything that matters gets compiled into my second brain, a wiki that Claude writes and keeps current. I'm the only user, and that's the point: it's designed around exactly how I think and work.
Every tool makes you the one who remembers
My day was spread across email, texts, a calendar and a notes app, and every one of them waited for me to do the work: recall what I'd promised, file what I'd saved, notice who I owed a reply. Second-brain tools promise to make you smarter, but most quietly make you the librarian. Assistants answer whatever you ask, but you have to know what to ask at 7am, which is exactly when you don't.
React, don't produce
Felix does the work before I ask, so I correct a draft instead of starting from a blank page. The brief is already written when I open the app. Filing is proposed, not requested, and structure is built by the AI, never by me tagging things. It's recognition over recall, and it all happens in one conversation: capture, the brief and craft are all ways of talking to Felix, not separate places to go.
Helm became Felix's desk
Felix's Mac app started life as Helm, a separate email chief of staff I'd been building. In September I folded it in: one assistant and one memory, with the Mac as its home base. There, Felix reads my mail and iMessages in a single Inbox, sorts what matters into a Priority tab, and tells the phone's brief who's waiting on me. One rule carried over from Helm: Felix advises, I act. It drafts a reply when I ask, but it never sends anything on its own. Only my tap sends.
Where knowledge compounds
Every conversation and capture leaves the brain a little smarter, so tomorrow's Felix knows more than today's. Claude compiles what mattered into a wiki: summaries of sources, pages for the people and projects that keep coming up, concepts that recur across domains, and a profile of my taste. The conversations themselves stay private on the phone. Only the meaning reaches the brain: commitments, decisions, people, design reactions. A single librarian process on the Mac is the only thing allowed to write the wiki, so nothing ever overwrites anything else.
A design coach in my pocket
Felix is also how I get better at my job. In a craft session it pulls a real app screen from Mobbin, one at a time, and I critique it out loud. Felix pushes back, names the principle behind what works, and files my reactions into a living profile of my design taste. That profile now shapes every AI I work with, including the one that helped build this page.
Light only comes from the three bodies
Felix's look, which I call Stable Era, borrows from The Three-Body Problem: near-black, austere, and lit only by three bodies in orbit. The orbit runs on real three-body physics. While Felix thinks it's chaotic, and when the answer is ready it settles into a figure-eight. Felix speaks in a literary serif and I speak in a neutral sans, so the conversation reads as two voices. Motion is gentle and moves whole blocks at a time, and it never holds an answer back for a flourish.
