Share your best AI workflow. We could show it to 2M+ people.

Everyone I know who runs a second brain uses Obsidian. The app is free, but sync is a subscription, and most AI integrations quietly assume you have it. I went another way: Joplin, which is free and open source, with an agent that reads my notebook through Joplin’s REST API, files my INBOX every morning while I sleep, and answers questions strictly from notes I actually wrote. It costs nothing beyond a VPS I already run, and the notebook still opens like a notebook. I use Hermes Agent on the VPS, Dropbox to sync notes between my devices, and Python scripts to connect the notebook and the agent. Every capture goes through `joplin_capture.py` and lands in a single INBOX folder with a source and timestamp attached. Captures can come from a Discord link, a thought from my phone, or a page from the web clipper. The process takes under ten seconds and requires no filing decisions at capture time, because filing at capture time is where second brains die. Joplin already ships with a REST API. I enable it with one setting and one token; the notebook then exposes HTTP on localhost:41184 with token authentication on every call. The same server powers the official web clipper, so this enables infrastructure I use anyway. There is no plugin, cloud service, or subscription. `joplin_filer.py` runs daily at 07:00 and uses a deterministic classifier to score each INBOX note against my existing folders. It uses token coverage rather than Jaccard, which dilutes single-token folders. Confident matches above 0.5 are moved into place: a hosting page goes to the hosting folder, while a security note goes to the security folder. Low-confidence notes stay in INBOX with the `needs-review` tag. Every move is logged to a FILER LOG note in the `__SYSTEM` folder, making the process auditable. The filer never deletes anything. I ran it in dry-run mode for a week before letting it touch a single note, and I recommend doing the same. When I want to know what I have learned, `joplin_ask.py` searches the corpus, reads the top notes in full, and answers with the note titles attached. It answers strictly from retrieved content. If the top hits are irrelevant, I refine the query before concluding there is nothing. It never invents a source, which matters when you write about security for a living. After each working session, `joplin_agent_log.py` prepends a digest to an AGENT LOG note in `__SYSTEM`. The log is newest first, append only, and syncs to my devices like everything else. The agent’s memory records what we did, decided, and deferred in the same place as the notes. The whole build is on GitHub: github.com/ciberjohn/mysecondBrain. It includes five Python scripts and the `joplin-brain` skill, which is the operating manual in a format another agent can load and follow. Step-by-step: 1. I enabled Joplin’s built-in REST API with one setting and one token. It serves HTTP on localhost:41184 with token authentication on every call and also supports the official web clipper. 2. I pointed Hermes Agent on my existing VPS at the Joplin REST API. 3. I routed every capture through `joplin_capture.py` into a single INBOX folder, attaching the source and a timestamp. Captures can come from Discord, my phone, or the web clipper. 4. I configured `joplin_filer.py` to run daily at 07:00 and score INBOX notes against my existing folders using token coverage rather than Jaccard. 5. I moved matches with scores above 0.5 into their folders, while leaving low-confidence notes in INBOX with the `needs-review` tag. 6. I logged every move in a FILER LOG note in the `__SYSTEM` folder and ensured that the filer never deletes anything. 7. I ran the filer in dry-run mode for a week before allowing it to move a note. 8. I used `joplin_ask.py` to search the corpus, read the top notes in full, and answer questions with the source note titles attached. When results were irrelevant, I refined the query. 9. After each working session, I used `joplin_agent_log.py` to prepend a digest to the newest-first, append-only AGENT LOG note in `__SYSTEM`. 10. I used Dropbox to sync notes between my devices and the REST API to move notes between Joplin and the agent—two separate pipes carrying the same notes in different directions.

I record a meeting on my phone and send the audio file to my Telegram chat with Hermes, my local AI agent. That is the only trigger—there is no app, upload page, or extra step. Hermes runs on my PC through WSL and handles the rest locally, except for the LLM analysis. Step-by-step: 1. Send the audio via Telegram. I drop the meeting recording into my Telegram chat with Hermes. 2. Create the meeting record. When Hermes receives the audio message, it calls a FastAPI endpoint at `localhost:8200`. The endpoint creates a meeting record and uploads the file. It is a thin Python server backed by SQLite, using async SQLAlchemy. 3. Transcribe the meeting locally. The backend runs faster-whisper on my PC, so there is no cloud transcription API or transcription cost. It handles large files and produces the full text with timestamped segments. 4. Identify the speakers. A diarization pass determines who spoke when. I can optionally upload a 10-second voice sample for each person; the system stores MFCC features and can automatically label speakers such as “Steve” and “Andrew” in future meetings. Diarization is best-effort, so transcription still works if it fails. 5. Analyze the transcript with an LLM. The transcript and timestamped segments are sent to DeepSeek through the OpenRouter API. A single structured prompt extracts: - A TL;DR - Thematic topic groups - Decisions made - Open questions - Risks flagged - A participant list - Tags - Proposed action items, each with an owner, priority, due date, confidence score, source timestamp, and the exact transcript quote it came from 6. Send action items to the todo app. Each proposed task has a Create in Todo button. With one click, I send it to my separate local `agent-native-todo` service on port `8100`, along with the meeting title, evidence quote, and timestamp as context. The todo app runs independently; the meeting app only calls its REST API. 7. Review everything in the web miniapp. The results appear in a React SPA at `/miniapp/`, which includes a meeting list, FTS5 full-text search, transcripts with clickable timestamps that jump to the corresponding point in the audio, color-coded tasks, speaker name editing, and audio playback with seek. The stack is: - Backend: Python FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy, and SQLite - Transcription: faster-whisper, installed with `pip install faster-whisper` - Diarization: pyannote.audio or a similar tool; optional because transcription works without it - LLM: OpenRouter API with DeepSeek, using one structured prompt and JSON mode - Frontend: React, Vite, and plain CSS without a framework - Agent glue: Hermes Agent receives Telegram messages and orchestrates the API calls - Todo integration: Any task app with a REST API; the meeting app only needs to POST to it The only part that costs money is the LLM analysis step, which costs about $0.01 per meeting through DeepSeek. Everything else runs on my PC.

I use AI agents across roughly half of my startup, including search, security testing, development, and affiliate integrations. - Smart Shopping Deals search: It never relies on a single AI provider. I use a chain of backup providers for LLM-based search and embeddings with pgvector. If one provider fails or times out, the system silently retries with the next. A slow provider never hangs the request, and users never see the failure. In the worst case, the system falls back to plain search. - Security testing: I run the autonomous AI security agent Strix against my live preview after every deploy. It actively attacks the app the way a hacker would. - Development workflow: My real “team” is a four-layer testing rule enforced by the AI itself. Every feature has to ship with backend tests, component tests, full browser end-to-end tests, and test-data setup, all in the same commit. Claude Code doesn’t consider a feature “done” until all four exist—not just the code. - Affiliate parsing: One parser handles every affiliate network. I paste in the raw ad code from any network, and the same parser automatically extracts the banner link, image, and destination URL. No network-specific code is needed.