Everything you were told to do, at the moment you need it.
You already took the notes — therapy, coaching, books, calls. This reads them and hands back a deck of cards, filed by the moment you’d need one. Click the menu bar icon, pick the trigger you’re actually in, and the first card is already there.
What’s happening?
Live — click a tile, or press 1–8 ←→ esc
How it works
Notes in. A thing you press, out.
Nothing to file, nothing to tag. The reading happens on a schedule, and new cards land on their own.
- 1You take notesTherapy, coaching, books, calls — then never open them again.
- 2AI reads themIt pulls out every tool, skill and idea you were actually given.
- 3Your toolboxFiled by the moment you'd need it. One click, ten seconds.
The panel
Ten seconds, start to finish.
A real glass panel that hangs off the menu bar, opens on the grid every time, and closes when you click away.
One tile per moment
Not topics — moments. “I have an urge”, “my lid flipped”, “I feel guilty”. You pick the one you're in, not the one you'd file it under.
A deck, not a document
Each tile opens a deck of cards: a title, one line telling you what to do, and the steps. Arrow keys move through it.
Keys all the way down
1–8 jump straight to a trigger, arrows move, esc backs out and then closes. Your hands never leave the keyboard.
Edit anything, keep it
The pencil beside a card edits it. Anything you touch is marked yours, and sync will never reword or remove it again.
Your notes
Four places, and whatever else you already use.
Servers you sign into, folders you point at. Any other MCP server you have added to Codex works the same way.
GranolaServerSign in once in the browser. Your meeting notes, read where they live.
NotionServerSign in once in the browser. Pages come in, and the deck can go back out.
ObsidianFolderPoint it at a folder and that folder is the scope. Vault/Therapy stays Vault/Therapy.
Apple NotesPermissionGranted once, then read through macOS itself. Nothing is ever deleted.
Sync
Cards arrive on their own.
The app watches for changed notes — hourly by default, or only when you ask. When something moves, it is re-read and the new cards land with a dot on the menu bar icon and a receipt of what changed.
- Undo puts it back. One click returns the previous deck, whole.
- Your edits are untouchable. Anything you wrote by hand survives whatever a sync proposes.
- Local sources cost nothing. A vault or Apple Notes is checked by hashing the files where they sit — milliseconds, and no tokens.
- Review first, if you want. Turn off automatic cards and every proposal waits for you.
And it goes back out
Pick one destination and, after every sync, the deck is written there as notes: markdown in the vault, notes in a “Brainbox” folder, pages in Notion. That is what puts the deck on your phone.
Strictly one-way — editing the published copy changes nothing here, and nothing is ever deleted from Apple Notes.
Your notes never leave this Mac
Reading your notes is done by Codex, which the app runs as a subprocess on your own machine. Your content lives in one JSON file you can open, edit and keep. The only connection the app opens for itself is signing in.
Point Obsidian at Vault/Therapy and the rest of the vault is never opened.
Keys
The whole interface.
| 1–8 | Jump straight to a trigger from the grid |
| ←→ | Previous / next card in the deck |
| esc | Back to the grid, then close the panel |
| ⌘1–9 | Switch space |
| ⌘Q | Quit |
Build it
No Xcode required.
It builds with the Command Line Tools and assembles the .app bundle directly.
git clone github.com/deanallen/brainbox
cd brainbox
./build.sh && open "build/Brainbox.app"