Personal · 2026
Cortex
A knowledge-ingestion bot that takes whatever you throw at it, links, voice notes, half-formed thoughts, and routes it somewhere you'll actually find it again. Built on Telegram, tested on people who weren't me.
The thing I care about here is the shape of the test, not the build. I ran Cortex as a 24-day experiment with real external users, not a screenshot and a claim. Twenty-four days is long enough for the novelty to wear off. That's exactly the window where most personal tools quietly stop being opened, and it's the number I wanted.
It was mid-plan to migrate off Telegram and onto WhatsApp, reusing the stack I'd already built and hardened for Arnold, because the experiment genuinely showed the routing worked and Telegram was the wrong doorway for the people I wanted using it.
The phone holding the WhatsApp number for the Arnold stack was stolen from my house. That blocked the migration Cortex was halfway through. Same event, two paused projects. It was not abandoned for lack of results. Naming the boring real cause matters, because a gap here just gets filled in with the usual one.