Why I Built a Second Brain

Getting an AI assistant to understand your work takes more than asking a question. You explain the problem, share the background, and help it understand what a good result looks like. When that context stays in one conversation, starting a new session or trying another tool can mean rebuilding it. I wanted that understanding to carry forward. While I was developing the brief for this article in Codex, Claude Code was running the AI Education workflow for the same issue of Neural Gains Weekly. Both could draw on the working methods and relevant context I had built, so I could develop one section while another moved forward. That flexibility grew through a series of experiments with how I organize my work and guide the tools.

I want to move quickly and get as much done as possible while keeping the work accurate and thorough. Between the newsletter, personal builds, my job, and Explore AI Out Loud, I am often moving from one project to another. I wanted the decisions, lessons, and instructions from earlier sessions to be available when I returned to a project, even if I had forgotten a detail. Making the work easier to resume and the tools easier to guide gives me more room to think creatively. Over time, that goal led me to build a folder structure and what I now call my second brain, a maintained foundation of context, working methods, and lessons that I can use across projects and AI tools.

The podcast Explore AI Out Loud Find practical ways to use AI in your work and everyday life. Learn from real experiments, including the mistakes, so you can spend less time guessing and more time trying something useful. New episodes every other Tuesday.

Subscribe on YouTubeFollow on SpotifyFollow on Apple Podcasts

Latest episodes and the show

From Chats to Shared Context

My early work with AI lived in the cloud, between ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Drive. I began with individual chats in ChatGPT and added custom instructions in its settings to explain how I wanted it to respond across chats. I then learned about Projects, workspaces where related conversations can use a shared set of context files and instructions. I started organizing the background and guidance around the work I returned to regularly. When I became interested in testing and experimenting in Claude, I moved my existing context into Claude Projects, with separate conversations for Founder’s Corner, AI Education, and the other newsletter sections. Projects helped me learn how to structure that information so it could carry across sessions. Each workflow gave me another opportunity to understand what context an assistant needed to help me produce the content I wanted.

As I worked through those newsletter sections, I built up instructions and memory in Claude Projects about the content I wanted and how I liked to work. I wanted each issue to build on what I was learning about how to guide AI. The context and guidance lived in Projects, while the final content drafts lived in Google Docs. I began capturing recurring workflows in skills, written instructions that explained what to produce, how to approach the task, and what to check in the result. Those skills evolved as I refined the workflows, but keeping them current was manual. Every time I changed one, I had to upload the new version into the Project and delete the older one. Making an improvement therefore also meant maintaining the version available to the assistant.

I made Google Drive the source of truth for the latest skill versions and built a router file in my Claude Project, written directions telling the assistant where to find them. That connected the Project to the source I was updating as I improved the workflows. It also gave me a clearer sense of what I wanted to carry into other tools. As I experimented with different models, I wanted to run newsletter workflows in parallel across platforms with the context and guidance I had already built. Most of that work still lived in one provider at a time. Projects had taught me to organize context around ongoing work, and maintaining skills had taught me how to preserve an evolving method. I wanted that foundation available wherever I chose to work next. Taking that step would mean looking beyond the tools I already associated with newsletter work.

Looking Beyond the Chat Window

I associated tools like Claude Code and Codex with coding projects, so it took me time to see how they could fit into newsletter work. My context had been living in cloud tools, and I was still learning how local folders could support the information behind a project. Getting a Mac at work and onboarding Cursor and Claude Code gave me an opportunity to learn how my engineering team set up local environments. Seeing that approach helped me understand how a project could have a home on the computer, with its instructions and relevant information available for the work. It expanded what I could imagine doing with these tools and accelerated my learning about how to build a shared foundation of context and instructions for different AI tools.

Those lessons carried into my personal workflows. As I changed how I ran the newsletter workflows, updating the skills in Drive became easier and faster for me. I could use the tools to help maintain the instructions behind the work, and I began seeing possibilities for building improvement into the workflows themselves. The folder structure was developing alongside that understanding. I was finding places for the guidance and project information I wanted the tools to use, while learning what needed to stay current. These were gradual changes to work I already knew, and they were laying the groundwork for a larger build.

By the time I came across the second-brain concept on X, I had already been organizing context, maintaining skills, and finding ways to carry lessons into future work. Recognizing those efforts in the concept helped me picture where the build could go, and I asked my AI assistant to research second-brain strategies and existing builds so we could learn from how others had approached it. Combining that research with the folder structure already taking shape through my experiments became the starting point for my own second-brain project. I have also shared an experimental starter on GitHub for anyone curious about the structure behind this build. It includes shared guidance, templates, and a fictional walkthrough you can explore as you think about how you want to work.

I shaped the build by answering questions about how I think and want to work, drawing on what I had learned in ChatGPT and Claude Projects. I like to define the problem and the outcome before choosing a solution, and I prefer an interview that develops the context one question at a time. Those preferences became shared guidance I could bring into different projects, while each project kept its own current information and a record of decisions and next steps.

When a workflow needs a correction, I want to review what happened, improve the relevant instructions, and test whether the change helps. As the build grew, I chose to focus on using the second brain in everyday work before taking on a broader cleanup of my computer. I wanted a foundation I could carry into new work and new tools, so each experiment could build on what I had already learned.

Making More Room to Create

For familiar newsletter sections, I have started running the same workflow in Claude Code and Codex with the same roadmap, context, and skill. Comparing the results helps me decide which version explains an idea clearly or makes a practical lesson easier to follow. I make that choice based on what I know about the newsletter and what I want readers to take from it.

As Brandon and I build Explore AI Out Loud, I want these workflows to give us more room for preparation and creative thinking. That is the purpose I keep coming back to as I refine the second brain. New features and releases give me more possibilities to investigate, and trying them in my own work helps me decide which improvements are worth keeping.

Learning enough to try tools I had associated with coding changed what I could imagine doing with AI. That experience is why I want to keep experimenting as the second brain develops. If you explore the GitHub starter, begin with a project you already know and think about what would help you pick it up again. That is the kind of question that led me to this build, and it can give you a reason to try something new.

The podcast Follow Explore AI Out Loud Short clips from each episode, plus what did not make the cut. New episodes every other Tuesday.

Follow on InstagramFollow on TikTok

Full episodes and the show