Why I Built This
Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, Notion, Obsidian — I tried them all. The problem was never the tool. It was the scattering. Half my knowledge lived in one app, the other half somewhere else, and the connections between them were trapped inside my head.
Privacy made it worse. Notion felt uncomfortable — my notes sitting on someone else’s server. Obsidian kept everything local, which I liked, but it was stuck on one machine. I wanted something I could access from anywhere, something I fully owned.
So I built Ocean Brain. One place for everything I know, under my control.
Why “Ocean Brain”
Most of the time, my mind feels completely still. But when someone asks me a question, I can feel the right note surfacing — like casting a line into calm water and pulling something up from the deep.
That’s what my brain is: a quiet ocean. You can’t see what’s underneath just by looking. But it’s all there, waiting to be retrieved. Ocean Brain is built around that idea — a place where knowledge sinks in and resurfaces exactly when you need it.
How I Think, Translated to Code
I chose BlockNote as the editor — not to reinvent the Notion experience, but to skip reinventing it. The writing feel had to be familiar. What I spent my time on was the structure underneath.
Folders and hierarchies break. Reorganize once, and every path changes. But when knowledge is linked by references and tags, the structure stays fluid. I can connect a new idea to an old one, add a tag, remove a tag — the web reshapes itself without anything breaking. That’s Zettelkasten, and it’s how I naturally think. When someone asks me something, I don’t browse a folder tree. I search a word. The note surfaces. So Ocean Brain works the same way: references, back-references, a knowledge graph, and search at the center.
What I Learned
I believed the best versioning was no versioning — keep the app simple, don’t over-engineer. Then a package update broke a user’s data at runtime. I fixed it quickly, but it stung. Versioning wouldn’t have prevented that specific bug — it was a runtime issue, not a rollback problem. But the incident made something clear: once other people depend on your tool, “simple” isn’t an excuse to skip the safety net. I started versioning right after, if only to keep NPX and Docker releases in sync and give users something stable to pin to.
Where It’s Going
Ocean Brain is just getting started. A single NPX command gets it running now — that’s the foundation for what comes next: MCP integration.
Privacy and AI might sound like opposites, but Ocean Brain sits at the intersection. Your knowledge stays on your machine, fully yours. AI doesn’t need to take it away — it just needs a channel to talk with it. That’s the vision: the closest place where a human and AI can have a conversation. Not on someone else’s cloud. Right here, inside your own brain.