TK by Medium

An agentic notebook to build your best thinking

Productivity

Notes

Artificial Intelligence

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I've had a blog since 2003, and I started writing on Medium in 2015. I've written mostly about public health (my day job), but I also write about my life and the things that interest me. It's been great to grow a community on Medium, and I'm excited about the possibilities of a bigger community on TK, a community of writers. I've been using TK for a few months, and it has kept me writing each day, reading other people’s writing, and thinking about how to better communicate the complex issues I want to write about. TK is simple, but powerful. It really does feel like a notebook with some superpowers that help you write without writing for you.

I'm the Community Manager on the TK team. I've written extensively in TK for personal and professional projects. One of my favorite things about TK is how simple it makes writing. The app has helped me piece together my thinking, accelerate my writing process, and more importantly, share my work with the right people.

The AI assistant and skills help me discover hidden themes in my writing, turn my work into outlines, memos, and other work that can live beyond TK. And Libraries are the home where I can share my work with people I trust and get feedback that unlocks new ideas. It's been a really fun experience developing the Community behind the product, and I'm excited to see how you use TK, and what it helps you uncover.

I've been using TK for a few months and have really been enjoying it. Go Tony and Team!

Congrats Tony and team! "Every word you write works on your behalf" is a lovely way to put it. As someone who keeps notes as plain Markdown files, I'm curious: can I get my TK notebooks out as Markdown or plain text, so the thinking stays portable outside Medium?

I'm one of the engineers on TK, so take this with the appropriate grains of salt, but I joined the team as someone who wrote in brief, sporadic bursts, very occasionally. I admit I was worried about joining Medium, a company built on writing, and the TK team, to build a product to write in, as someone who wasn't a habitual writer.

Building TK, and using it, has made me a fierce believer in writing as a practice. At the most foundational level, writing is a way to think, and writing is also a way to force yourself to think about what you want to write about, even when you're not writing. This is good, and is achievable with a pencil and paper. You can also do it in a bare-bones editor. And you can do some great organization and discovery and search with an editor, and there are great tools to do this.

The thing that's new, of course, is LLMs. LLMs operate on text. Their nature is textual.

Someone (I truly wish I could find who to credit for this) made the metaphor that LLMs are "text elementals." (forgive me, I'm about to nerd out about Dungeons and Dragons, but briefly: "elementals" are magical entities in D&D that have special traits associated with and abilities to manipulate one of the four "elements": earth, air, fire or water) As "text elementals," LLMs exist on the text plane, their home is words and they operate on words and they can do something that feels like magic with words. So when you, as a writer, create words, you're extending the plane on which these text elementals can operate, and they grant you a different kind of power to operate on those words.

Sometimes this is goofy (one of my favorite skills in TK is a "high school alignment chart" that classifies a corpus of writing in the classic nerd/jock | prep/nerd quadrants) and sometimes it's genuinely powerful. We have users writing books, using TK's assistant to help them organize themes and find inconsistencies. I use it to extract themes from essays I write about TK, and to help me organize my thinking about the product itself and how we build it. I have a handful of cron jobs that launch Claude Code and run skills I've built to search for and collect user feedback in TK and share that to a TK library, which is indexed nightly by an llm-wiki skill. Then, I can use the output of those skills, and my own writing, to improve the product, and improve my thinking about the product, and write (like I am here) as a human being about the things the text elementals have discovered for me.

Anyway, this product has been a labor of love for me and -- I think it's safe to say -- everyone on the team, and I hope using it brings you as much joy as it's bringing us to build it.

I didn't "work" on this app in the engineering sense, but I worked on this app in that I've written literally thousands of words in it, shared feedback with the team, watched it turn into something amazing, and (most importantly for me) had space to write out my muddled, messy thinking in a clean, free space until my ideas started making sense.

Thinking should be hard, that's what makes it valuable. Writing all your thoughts makes it easier, and TK is the perfect place to do so. My random musings have ultimately turned into:

• A book draft

• A marketing memo I was proud to share with the company

• Blog posts that reached thousands of readers

• Who knows what else is yet to come? The more I write, the more possibility those nuggets of thoughts turn into polished, influential writing that spreads.

It's not just having a place to drop the thoughts -- TK's AI helped find the connections between what I originally thought were random, unrelated ideas. But when you have a place to write down all your thoughts and an agent combing through your scribbles for the gems, it's much easier to start turning notions into notes into the next big thing.

All this to say, I have loved working on and in TK and I can't wait to bring it to more users!

The first writing app that makes me consider dropping Ulysses after many years. That says something. I'm the loyal type, so jumping ship and adopting TK is a big deal for me. TK works much better than any current writing app if you're someone who has fleeting thoughts that you sometimes want to turn into an article, a book, share with a group of people or just work that writing muscle by developing a habit. And the fact that I can have an AI assistant do research for me right there in the app WHILE I keep writing... that's pretty special.

It’s become second nature to reach for TK. It started with just some daily journaling, which just by itself was delightful, but I’ve started working in TK because it’s just so smooth for writing and refining. I’ve used the skill and Claude integration to create a social media content machine that searches for idea nuggets, expands them into social media posts or video scripts, then Claude grabs them and drops them into ordinal. I feel a bit like a god? And the content I’m sharing is still mine, and sounds like me.

I wish there were a way to say this that wouldn't sound so cheesy: I remember what it felt like to get my blogger account, and to be able to write about muddy, messy, or even mundane things, and turn strangers into lifelong friends because of words. I remember what it felt like to get my twttr account, and turn strangers into lifelong friends because of words. These past months of the TK beta have felt exactly the same. And, yet again, I feel complete strangers becoming lifelong friends, just because of words.

So, yeah, I 1000% subscribe to the premise underlying this moonshot, and I'm glad you keep going and keep trying and keep believing that writing is thinking, and thinking is important.

An MCP server on a notes app is the detail that makes this more than another notebook, because my thinking already lives partly in Claude and I would want it to pull from the same place I write.