I Wish I Knew This Before Building an AI Second Brain | by James Wilkins | May, 2026 | Towards AISitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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I Wish I Knew This Before Building an AI Second Brain

James Wilkins

16 min read·<br>May 19, 2026

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It doesn’t matter how much AI you throw at it; if the fundamentals aren’t there, it’ll fall apart.<br>Expanding the context you provide an AI model with is the single best way to improve the quality of the responses you’ll get and how effectively an agent can work for you.<br>My Second Brain is filled with everything I write, webpages I clip, notes I take, my daily logs, my projects, and any conversations with AI that I decide are worth saving. Claude has access to all of it. I don’t even need to tell it to look. Claude knows what’s in my Second Brain; it knows to search for whatever it needs; and knows how to access things when it finds what it’s looking for.<br>Not a Member? Consider Joining! In the meantime, you can read this article, completely free, here!

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Here’s one of my project vaults. It’s about 2 months old so far and going strong.This, however, is not my first attempt at this sort of persistent knowledge system. I’ve been experimenting with different architectures and combinations of tools over the past few months, and until recently, they’ve all had the same problem.<br>AI is just really unpredictable.

Published in Towards AI<br>144K followers<br>·Last published just now

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Written by James Wilkins<br>5.4K followers<br>·86 following

AI pragmatist | Producer of human-generated writing | Newsletter, Essays, and more at jdhwilkins.com

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