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Teekay

Medium

Mediumtk

Second Brain

Notetaking

25 Ways That I’m Using TK

Tony Stubblebine

5 min read

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Jun 10, 2026

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I’d like to have a few more early testers for the writing app we’re working on. It’s a place for all your writing, notes, drafts, and a bit more. We’re in what I’d call early paid beta: tk.xyz

A goal in building TK is to imagine what a writing app would look like if it were designed to encourage as much writing as possible.

A lot of people resist writing, but we see writing as inherently healthy, fun even. It’s a way to create a conscious life in which your writing sharpens your thinking and shapes your experience of your digital life.

Especially in this AI era, we want to explore how AI can instead be used to elevate human thought. Here are some of the main examples

1. This first one has nothing to do with AI. I write a public journal entry almost every morning as a form of writing practice. I post them to Daily Journal along with a group of other writers.
2. Then I start a Daily Note that is part interstitial journaling and part scratch pad. This is what I work from all day.
3. Here is the main “stay in the flow” AI feature that you can use without leaving your editor. For me, opening a new tab triggers instant procrastination. But being able to do research inline keeps me focused. For example, I found the interstitial journaling link above by typing TK link to my medium post on intersitial journaling
4. I imported all my Medium posts and drafts, then asked TK to help me organize them into a book about mindfulness (a big focus of my prior work). AI-fluent programmers start building new software with a planning phase, and that’s the same development pattern I’m using with this book. You can see the plan and AI prompts here: Research and Planning for The Quiet Advantage.
5. I wrote a post about my morning pages — and then posted it to Medium, where I have an audience: AI made morning pages worth doing again
6. I also added my family pie recipes, The Stubblebine Family Pies, because I see TK as a home for everything that I write down.
7. Before I added that recipe, I had the TK assistant rewrite the directions to include the ingredient amounts. This is my pet peeve about how recipes are written. It should be “add 1tsp sugar,” not “add the sugar." Right? Otherwise, on your phone, you have to scroll up and down between the two sections. Or pre-measure everything like a psychopath.
8. If I’m using an online recipe that isn’t written that way, I copy and paste it into TK and then use the AI to transform it into my preferred style.
9. I published that pie recipe in a shared Library where everyone can contribute recipes. I don’t know if it’ll take off, but I like the idea of communally created second brains. Add your recipes here: Recipe Box
10. I also imported all my (~3,000) notes from Bear. Then I asked the TK assistant: “Plot my personality across two dimensions, goth vs. prep and nerd vs. jock.” I am deeply un-goth and strangely motivated to fix that.
11. I wrote a Skill (which is just a long AI prompt) to create poetry writing exercises, and then wrote my first poem ever. Type /poetry-prompts-feedback in the Assistant sidebar.
12. I tend to type TK when I mean our TK app and then hit Escape to close the TK interaction. I see other people type TeeKay. To mark a placeholder, I type TKTK.
13. I read a book about Zettelkasten and started a Zettelkasten about books about writing: How to Zettelkasten in TK.
14. I use the big iOS widget on my home screen so it’s easy to take voice notes, access my daily note, and see my most recent notes. I don’t create much from my phone, but I do use it to capture quick ideas and to remind me of my todos.
15. I keep a long list of Basic Gear & Clothes, because I aspire to use lists in TK to create an operating manual for my life. Some of the clothes on that list are why TK thinks I’m all prep and no goth.
16. There are a bunch more common reasons that I use TK’s inline AI assistant. It’s a more natural way to find a word than a thesaurus. Example: TK find me some cowboy themed words that I can pair with or make a pun out of Road Map​
17. I look up facts. ​TK how many liters to a gallon?
18. My most common, though, is looking up citations to pages that I already know exist. TK add a link to the Wikipedia page about Medium​
19. I wrote the first version of our /wikify skill and am learning that it is a key action for anything second-brain related. We should probably auto-run it on all of your tags if you import notes from another note-taking tool. For example, here is the wikify of all my Medium drafts: Wiki: Draft Notes.
20. I wrote the first version of our /submit-to-medium-publication skill and ran it on my journal entries to find blog post ideas to submit to Medium.
21. I create task lists out of my current and recent notes. TK search my recent notes for things that I said I need to do and create a task list​
22. I connected TK’s MCP server (tk.xyz/mcp) to Claude and pull TK notes into Claude chats and then publish Claude research into TK. I can tell I’m headed toward the LLM second brain pattern, where I have entire tags that are AI-generated and collected research that I organize with the /wikify skill.
23. I restarted my Codex of life wisdom, but this time with the idea that it will often be read by AI assistants. I do want them to operate with the benefit of my wisdom and preferences! Tony’s New Codex Vitae. A “book of wisdom” collected over my life.
24. I created a skill out of my prior writing to mimic my own voice. Now I know that’s a terrible idea.
25. I’m really underselling how much I like reading and writing in the Daily Journal library. It’s like old-school casual blogging.

What am I leaving out? There’s a lot that I don’t quite have working yet. Two important skills: turning posts into social media posts and editing my own writing. Co-authoring my Daily Note with Claude so that I have a daily briefing and pre-meeting briefings already loaded. What it’s like to finish a long-term project like writing a book or creating a Zettelkasten.But it’s early days, and the 25 bullets above are already doing a ton for my life.