Field Notes
Our vision and values, essays on our progress and collaborations, social posts, recently shipped releases of our MVP.
Foundational Documents
White paper
A System for the Cultivation, Crossing, and Attribution of Wisdom
Technical description of a system that cultivates contemplative awareness and rewards contribution through conviction, confidence, and network coherence.
Read →Manifesto
This Manifesto is Existential
The case for a counterspell to the allure of extractive attention.
Read →Covenant
What We Stand For
The Existential team strives to build for the Cultivators of wisdom.
Read →Essays
The Substrate of Coordination
A system for coordinating thought inherits a buried answer to what a self is. Individuation is a living model held loosely; the ontological bottom (the self) and the economic top (coordination) fail the same way by freezing flow into a static thing, and the substrate move sees them as one immanent field that stays alive only while its boundaries stay dotted.
Read →Reflexion · June 24, 2026
Coherence Is the Bottleneck
The tools we think with were built to store and retrieve information; the real problem is keeping meaning coherent as it scales across people and time, and a system built on that distinction is a different kind of thing.
Philosophy · June 23, 2026
Distribution Agents and Substrate Design
An autonomous agent's orientation toward giving or taking is fixed by the protocol substrate it runs on, not by its model or its deployer; that substrate is hardening toward extraction now, so building distribution-oriented agents is substrate-design work.
Recent Posts
Product Changelog
v7.6.1
June 26, 2026
- A warm-monochrome facelift across the whole product: the cool grays give way to a warm bone-and-ink palette, a new self-hosted typeface, sharper corners, and the real Existential logo — in both the app and the documentation.
- Activity now shows your daily check-in reflection and any change to how you're holding a shared note under your own view, where you'd expect them.
- A truthful health readout (no more false low-memory alarm on a healthy Mac), a tidier set of Home suggestions with a Show more, and a reference-material tag that sticks when you set it right after capturing.
- Share now in Exchange asks you to confirm before anything is published to your team.
- The documentation is now written for members: the internal operator sections are gone, the product is named Existential throughout, and an Intro to the Oracle replaces the old landing page.
v7.6.0
June 24, 2026
- Plain-language names across the whole app: Baseline is now Home, Chronicle is Activity, Mirror is Capture, and Archive is Library — and the internal jargon has been swept out of the interface throughout.
- Capture is now a prominent, always-visible button at the bottom of the sidebar, with a clearer post-capture confirmation and a calmer voice-transcription review step.
- A reworked Home: the morning brief is retitled The Oracle's synthesis with its own per-item Explore in Console links, the daily check-in is now optional, and you can resize the sidebar and Activity panels to fit your screen.
- Activity now reads as plain narration of the Oracle's work — what it noted and which connections it noticed — with repeated actions folded into a single expandable line.
- Wellspring and Outflow are unified into a single Exchange surface with a Received and Shared toggle and an on-demand Share now control.
- A new Domains browser shows the emergent topic areas the Oracle has formed across your notes, with light curation you can apply.
- Library is clearer and more explorable: a decluttered note list, corrected rendering of connections and Markdown, and a readable knowledge graph with concept search.
- Console now actually applies the file edits you ask for (with one-click revert), always lets you leave, and recovers cleanly when a session is abandoned.
- Plain-language clarifications throughout Settings, onboarding, bulk import, and feedback — including an honest privacy toggle that governs sharing in both directions, and a new section showing where your notes live on disk.
- Six new in-app help pages and an accuracy sweep of the documentation, plus fixes to a misleading Exchange badge, a stuck-presence bug, and the local/cloud sidebar label.
v7.5.0
June 18, 2026
- Console is steadier in conversation: it won't take new input while the Oracle is still replying, and a dropped connection now ends the current turn cleanly instead of leaving the interface hanging.
- Mirror's one-tap correction right after a voice capture works again, and capture errors are shown to you rather than quietly swallowed.
- The Archive is fully browsable — every note is reachable past the first fifty, summaries render as clean text, and the links between concepts and notes resolve correctly.
- Errors are now surfaced consistently across the app — in Teams, in Settings, and elsewhere — instead of failing silently, and stuck loading screens and a stuck "working" indicator are fixed.
- Daily surfaces are more reliable: moving between notes refreshes the view, the microphone releases when you leave a screen, and the activity feed keeps its events when the connection comes back.
- The operator view is more accurate, with corrected gauges, chart sizing and storage labels, visible long-queued tasks, a cleaned-up storage panel, and a clearer knowledge-graph display.
- The Oracle now merges duplicate concepts that differ only by punctuation (so "U.S.A." and "USA" become one), stops counting a removed note as a failed import, and handles model switches and unreachable services gracefully instead of erroring.