My Second Brain, as a Globe
I've been building a personal second brain for months now. Here's a visualization of it.
I want to own this. I should own this. It's my information, after all.
Yes, Claude knows a lot about me, but we should have agency over our information. I want it created a certain way, I want to use it in some situations and not in others, and most of all, I shouldn't be spooked by how much information about me is out there.
With this setup, my knowledge lives in plain text files in a folder on my own machine. I separate public from private.
With the latest Muse rollout, I used Claude side by side with Muse, where my agent is named Atticus, and my gates of not sharing my information held. Claude reads my vault, and Atticus only got counts, links and broad labels for the clusters, never the full content. The globe above is that same view.
I've been able to unlock a different level of automating tasks using different agents, and this setup has reduced the lock-in effect over something we should have complete domain agency over.
Admittedly, every .md Claude reads goes to Anthropic to be processed, so my setup is currently gating information by my permission to access certain knowledge bases. And of course, the model training toggle is off, along with the geo metadata collection.
Unfortunately, deleting a local .md doesn't take back what an agent already read.
Claude Code keeps its own session logs on my Mac, and Muse keeps its own history of everything I've said to Atticus.
The Claude Code app on my Mac enforces those permissions before the model sees the contents, though a broad search across the vault could still reach in. The personal details it used to load in every session, like my phone number, now live in one of those pockets and get read only when a task needs them.
The files are still mine, and I'm still tightening how much of them each agent gets to see.
Perhaps it's time to take the plunge and run an open-weight LLM on my own machine. More to come, but this is an early share as the next two weeks get hectic.