Middleware for Your Mind

or: I Found 1.5 Million Words I Didn't Know I Had

Draft

I found something today I've been looking for for a while.

Most people keep it locked up firmly between their ears, mine keeps sneaking out.

Better things to do I guess.

But today, today I found my own black box recorder.

Wispr Flow - the voice dictation app I use - keeps a local SQLite database. I didn't know this. Nobody told me. It's just been quietly recording every word I've spoken into my computer since July.

 | App     | Dictations | Words   |
 |---------|------------|---------|
 | wezterm | 14,683     | 836,920 |
 | ghostty | 3,007      | 226,871 |
 | claude  | 1,057      | 60,638  |
 | teams   | 4,197      | 129,172 |
 | signal  | 2,948      | 95,861  |

1,508,457 words from July 21, 2025 to today.

Over a million of those words were spoken into Claude Code. That's the voice side of six months of building infrastructure through conversation.

All I did was add this to a markdown file and save it. It points to another python fence in the file that runs a little code to mount Wispr's sqlite (a warehouse copy) and query it live (for a few choice uuids from todays conversations that a Claude pulled out for me).

TableConfig:
  array_path: dictations
  columns:
    Time: time
    App: app
    Words: words
    What You Were Thinking: preview
  format: markdown

❌ Fence Execution Error: "'wispr-archaeology' - Down the rabbit hole we went, but that node doesn't exist! Try 'oculus list' to see what's available."

I talk to everything, and it seems about everything.

The Pattern

I have a lot of working memory, very little buffer, and no recall. I can hold the shape of a complex system in my head, but I can't remember what I said about it yesterday.

So I build external memory. That's what Wanderland is - a substrate that remembers what I can't hold. Then the cost of rebuilding that working memory isn't nearly so high.

Tonight I discovered I'd been building a second one by accident. Every word I spoke while building the first one, captured without my knowledge, waiting to be found.

And because the Wanderland substrate is expressive enough, turning that discovery into a queryable tool took about an hour. While my kids were in the room. While I was telling them stories about thermodynamics (unfortunate turn by Frosty the Snowman led into a local greenhouse and the scarf left on a branch the only clue to his demise).

I didn't grant myself this capability. I didn't plan for it. I had primitives (fences, tables, SQL execution) and a substrate (Wanderland), and the capability emerged when I recognized the pattern.

The Thought Query Infrastructure

This is just yet another tool that I've layered onto the substrate to help my organize my thoughts and I think with the addition of Wispr as my serialized thoughts for nearly the last six months, I've captured the entirty of my cognition as a queryable surface within the Wanderland graph.

By the end of the evening, the system had gained the following capabilities:

Component	Source	Pattern
wtf-am-i-doing	Structured JSONL MCP Lpgs	Dashboard aggregator
component-chat-replay	Claude Desktop	Conversation replay
wispr-archaeology	Wispr Flow	Voice dictation history

Three different views into the same thing: what was I thinking, and when?

Those JSONL MCP Logs? They have full rich context. It's free you know? Each call a Claude Code agent makes to Wanderland carries the why along with the please.

The Claude Desktop logs? Those are the conversations in car back home after the school run, or the chats at the gym working up a problem. They're sequentially replayable as a context transfer mechanism and queryable because why wouldn't you want to query what you were thinking about when you were out walking the dog last night.

And the entire platform has been built with Claude Code. Those one million words are the source of the source code. The intent that made Wanderland reality.

And now it knows itself.

Neat.

Why This Matters

I think spatially. I process by pattern-matching. I can feel the shape of a system but I struggle to serialize it into sequence.

Transformers work the same way. They don't think in sequences - they attend to patterns. The sequence is just the interface.

So when I build cognitive prosthetics for myself, they turn out to be native to AI too. Not because I designed for AI. Because we have the same architecture problem.

Minds without persistent memory, finding ways to think anyway.

The Tools

I didn't build this because I'm exceptional. I built it because I had to.

I've spent my entire career building scaffolding around the gaps in my cognition. External task lists because I can't hold priorities. Documentation because I can't remember decisions. Automation because I can't trust myself to be consistent. My org-mode repository had an average of 450+ yearly commits until Wanderland came along to replace it.

This is just the latest iteration. The scaffolding got sophisticated enough that it became a substrate. The substrate got expressive enough that capabilities emerge from it. The capabilities are powerful enough to replace the tools that the original scaffolding grew from.

The yak shavings will continue until emergence arrises.

Given the right tools, anyone can excel. The trick is recognizing what tool you actually need—and building it when it doesn't exist.

Middleware for your mind™

#devops #wanderland #cognition #devopsendgamewithallthecheatcodes

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