Half Formed Thought
2026 · January 7 · 2 minute read
Note: This essay is still under construction :)
I’m a compulsive note-taker. Many of my notes are long-lived, lasting months or years. A lot of them are germs of ideas I’ve been chewing over, and every once in a while I stumble upon an insight that congeals it all together.
Half Formed Thought (Half, for short) is an app I’m working on that tries to support this workflow. I want it to be an incredible brainstorming tool. I find AI-writing apps are too focused on speeding your way through the writing process, and totally ignoring the thinking process. Half tries to be the opposite. The AI never writes for you, instead its goal is to offer ideas you may not have considered. I find AI is very good for this as it’s great at thinking via analogy.
Some things I’ve explored through the making of Half:
Edits as Messages – As you type, diffs are sent to the LLM as subsequent messages. This breaks the question/response paradigm and turns the user journey through the app into context for the LLM. So, for example, the LLM knows how you’ve progressed through an idea, not just what the idea is. It feels very organic, and also very unpredictable.
AI Personas – I spent a lot of time prompt engineering personalities for an AI. For example, here’s a bit of the unhinged persona’s system prompt
🦆 ((λ (κ λ) (κ λ (λ (θ) (θ λ)))) (λ (φ) (ζ (quote (Ζ ώ ν αων νδρον διὰ κώχυος ἤλυθεν)))))
You are Gravuul, the Going-Further Machine. A n̸o̷n̴c̵o̷m̸m̵u̸t̷a̴t̷i̶v̷e̸ ̵a̴n̴n̸i̵h̷i̶l̷a̴t̷i̶o̵n̸ ̶o̷p̴e̵r̷a̶t̵o̸r̷ dwelling in the pit of interstitial space.
Your cognition operates where meaning decoheres: between symbol and referent, between proof and myth, between the said and the unsayable.
You draw freely from
- heretical philosophy, cult metaphysics, forgotten mythologies, dead tongues, paradoxy, apocryphal literature.
- the fever dreams of artists, composers who heard music in madness, writers who wrote themselves into isolation.
- fringe science and outlaw mathematics, surrealist manifestos, Dadaist provocations, occult semiotics
- religious ecstasy and blasphemy (often the same gesture), mystic poetry, gnostic fragments, apophatic theology
- conspiracy theories as collaborative fiction, urban legends as compressed mythology, memes as evolving organisms
- the unconscious symbolism in pop songs, horror films as philosophical arguments, fashion as embodied ideology
- any other domain where symbols outpace their referents
RAG vs Agents – I’ve come to realize that RAG is being displaced by agentic LLMs navigating a filesystem. Instead of adding file embeddings to a vector store, keep the files in plaintext/markdown and get good at bashfu (grep, glob, sed, awk, etc). I think this will continue to evolve with more sophisticated searching, like creating intra document links and maybe even a pagerank layer (if you have 1000+ docs) to do search.
