Your First Week

Existential rewards a slow start. The Oracle reads what you bring it and builds an understanding of the territory your notes describe, and that understanding accumulates. So your first week is less a setup checklist than a settling-in. You write a few real thoughts, the Oracle reads them, and the surfaces fill in as it learns the shape of your thinking. This page walks the first actions and tells you, honestly, what each one produces and what is still thin.

Day one

Open Capture and write something you are thinking about. Press Command N from anywhere, or click Capture in the left sidebar, and a small dialog opens. Type a few sentences, paste a passage you have been chewing on, or drag in a Markdown file or a PDF. There is nothing to tag and no folder to choose. The Oracle infers all of that later.

When you save, watch Activity. Within a few seconds you see a line, "captured a note." Your words are now a plain Markdown file in your Library, and the Oracle has started to read it. The note moves through the ingestion pipeline, where it is tidied into a consistent format, read for structure and meaning, broken into passages, scored for conviction, placed in a category, and woven into the graph. When that finishes, a second line appears, "added to the Library."

Do that two or three more times across the day. You do not have to act on any of them. Activity is there to show you what the Oracle is doing, not to ask anything of you.

What the first days look like

Early on, most of your notes land in an inbox category. The Oracle has not yet seen enough of your thinking to place a note sharply, so it holds new material in a general bin and refines from there. As you keep writing, and as you adjust the occasional misplaced note in the Library, its placement gets sharper. This is the Oracle learning how your work is actually structured, from how you actually use it.

Your first morning brief will be thin, and that is expected. The brief gathers what your thinking has been doing and surfaces the threads worth carrying into the day, and it draws those threads from the graph the pipeline builds. With only a handful of notes in, there is little to draw from yet, so the brief opens with a calm line and an open question to sit with. The brief grows after the first ingestion runs complete and the graph has something to say. Give it a few days of real notes and it begins to reflect them back.

The daily surfaces, as they arrive

Home is the surface you land on when you open Existential. Two of its slots wait for you there and never summon you.

• The morning brief appears in the morning hours. It is the Oracle's synthesis of what it has been working on: the pieces of thinking it holds in highest conviction, the connections it noticed, and a framing of where you left off. It is there if you look.
• The evening close-out appears later in the day. Treat it as the real counterpart to the brief. Where the morning brief gathers what your thinking has been doing, the close-out gathers and settles the day, drawing together what landed in your Library and connecting it to the longer arc of what you have been working through. It is reflection at the other end of the day's rhythm.

A daily check-in shows up around midday, or whenever you arrive having not captured anything for a while. It is a single open prompt, one line, meant to lower the friction of coming back to your own thinking. You can answer it or ignore it.

By the end of the week

Once you have a week of real notes in, open the Library from the sidebar and browse. You will see your notes in reverse chronological order, grouped by category, and you can click any one to open the unified view, where your own text sits beside the pieces the Oracle drew from it, the concepts it surfaced, and the connections it made to the rest of your Library. This is where the accumulation becomes visible. The fragments you captured on day one are now scored, linked, and placed.

Try the Console once, too. It is the place to think something through with the Oracle in conversation rather than capture a finished thought. When you leave a Console session, the Oracle reviews what you talked about and, only when something genuinely new surfaced, saves it to your notes, where it ingests like any other capture. Most of the time it saves nothing, and that restraint is deliberate.

Where to go next

That is the whole posture in miniature: you write, the Oracle reads, and what is worth surfacing surfaces in the brief, the close-out, and the Library over time. When you are ready for the day-to-day detail of each surface, the Using Existential section covers Home, Capture, the Console, and the Library one at a time.