Suggest edit — Chronology — how the vision evolved, 2022→2026

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---
title: Chronology — how the vision evolved, 2022→2026
type: concept
visibility: public
related:
  - wiki/north-star-thesis.md
  - raw/slack-explainingideaflow-2022-2026.md
---

# Chronology

> "The vision hasn't necessarily changed longitudinally, but it has been **refined** and has **evolved and matured**, and more **forks have been discovered**, with more **details and realizations**."
> — Jacob, 2026-04-20, scoping this wiki

That framing is the backbone of this page. The north star has been stable. The vocabulary, the wedges, the audiences, and the *visible* surface have compounded.

## 2022 — the mission statement era

- **"Capturing the fleeting beauty of the world."** Jacob's earliest `#missionStatement / #explainingIdeaflow` framing, posted alongside *Rise of Superman* and *Flow in Sports* as source material.
- Undercurrent: sparks of motivation as treasures; the app as a tool for **gathering and focusing** them.

This is the seed. The 2026 civilization-scale framing is a mature plant; the seed was already there.

## 2023 — the marketing-tagline era

- **"The idea-capture app — never lose another idea again."** The consumer-facing framing.
- **"Gestalt capture system → gestalt processing system for society."** The ambition is already plural — personal capture is instrumental to collective processing.
- The transcription-aware-of-the-lexicon bug ticket (*"concatenate multiword hashtags, iff they are in the lexicon"*) is itself a micro-expression of the vision: structure sneaks into capture.

## Early 2024 — product-shape emerges

- **"First build a medium for thought, then there are things you can build in world with it."** (Joe Henke's phrasing, January 2024 — became house vocabulary.)
- **O(1) capture and recall.** (Cody Hergenroeder's product-level shorthand, February 2024.)
- **Backlinks shouldn't be subordinated.** (Taylor Mitchell's tree-vs-graph argument, February 2024 — became doctrine.)
- **End-to-end support system for the creative process.** February 2024, responding to the "intelligence = generation" reduction.
- **Suggestion Board for the World.** January 2024, first major upward-scale framing.

## Mid 2024 — scale reveals itself

- **Graph database for your brain.** March 2024, during the "best pitch" drafting session. Instantly iconic; survived verbatim through to 2026.
- **Neocortex for the global mind/brain.** March 2024. Personal-scale's mirror image at the civilizational layer.
- **Tool to discover the path of wisdom.** March 2024. The moral framing.
- **Massive-scale collective cognition system for humanity.** March 2024. The [[north-star-thesis|north-star]] line — tagged `#best #pitch` by Jacob himself.
- **The actual bicycle for the mind.** March 2024. The Jobs/Engelbart inheritance, claimed.
- **Quick capture, quick sort.** March 2024. The UX-level distillation.
- **Create an idea flow for every community.** May 2024. The "community Slack bot" vision takes shape.

## Late 2024 — external validation

- **Alex Kayyal (Lightspeed):** "Sort of what Google did for the Internet but for information not on the web but in people's minds." October 2024. First time an investor articulated the thesis back in public-quotable form.
- **Open source movement for knowledge graphs.** October 2024. The ideological stance crystallizes.
- **Debate outlines:** the "use Mew as a civic-infrastructure layer" experiment.

## 2025 — platform ambitions

- **ideaflow.blog.** April 2025 (Eden). Public pipeline for `#explaining-ideaflow` content + related past writing.
- **Munger seamless-trust quote** (Eden, May 2025). Cross-linked into the vision — Berkshire as proof that the trust-web is civilizationally higher-performing than bureaucracy. IdeaFlow's graph is the trust-web's substrate.
- **Notebook for our minds.** October 2025. The aesthetic compression.
- **Meeting notes first time in human history.** October 2025 (after Jacob+Tejas demo). Frontier claim about *what kind of object* a well-organized meeting record is.
- **The God data structure / Gopher backbone / GraphMirror.** October 2025. Maximalist framing — the substrate wants to contain everything.
- **Slack bot as idea harvester / internal-Twitter surfacing / innovation-management demo.** October-November 2025. Team-cognition layer productized.

## Early 2026 — where we are now

- **Hypergraph stores for LLMs** (October 2025 continuing). The observation that LLMs themselves want this substrate.
- **`#ExplainingIdeaFlow #whyNow #SemanticWeb`.** The why-now is codified: LLMs close the markup gap.
- **Vision Convo wiki** (April 2026). Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern applied to Jacob's full worldview recording. Sister wiki to this one.
- **This wiki** (April 2026). The longitudinal archive proper.

## Refinements (not changes)

The vision is the same. What has matured:

| Dimension | 2022 | 2026 |
|-----------|------|------|
| Name for the object | "the idea-capture app" | "massive-scale collective cognition system for humanity" |
| Core metaphor | sparks of motivation, fleeting beauty | same, plus graph, neocortex, God data structure |
| Scale of ambition | personal KM | personal ↔ team ↔ humanity substrate |
| Why-now | implicit | **LLMs close the markup burden gap** |
| Wedge | consumer KM app | enterprise team-cognition |
| Open/closed stance | unstated | explicit open-source KG movement |
| Co-authors of vocabulary | Jacob | Jacob, Joe (medium for thought), Cody (O(1)), Taylor (graphs over trees), Eden (Munger, blog pipeline), Tejas (meeting notes) |
| Place in history | "mission statement" | **continuation of Engelbart/Berners-Lee lineage** |

## Forks discovered along the way

- **GraphMirror** as a ProseMirror-for-graphs offering. (A toolmaker wedge.)
- **Mew hosts every website's backend.** (A Firebase-like wedge.)
- **Public curated lists beneficial to the world.** (A civic-infrastructure wedge.)
- **Alliance graph across friends' networks.** (A social-capital wedge.)
- **Slack → IdeaFlow → internal-Twitter surfacing.** (An internal-developer-feed wedge.)

Not all forks will be pursued. The point of a forks-discovered frame is: the substrate is general enough that its application surface keeps expanding *without* the substrate itself changing.

## Related

- [[north-star-thesis]] — the stable spine
- [[canonical-terms]] — the vocabulary that accreted
- [[framings]] — each major metaphor as its own page with its `first-used` date
- `raw/slack-explainingideaflow-2022-2026.md` — the underlying evidence