In early 2023, after teaching 6,000 students over six years, I abruptly decided to stop teaching our Building a Second Brain cohorts. 

Even at that early stage, with the release of the first version of ChatGPT just a couple months earlier, it was clear to me the impact this new technology would have. Almost from one day to the next, it felt like so much of what I’d built – my writing, my principles, my methods, my business – had suddenly become obsolete.

I could no longer authentically continue to teach the same methods and give the same advice in light of what I was seeing AI was now capable of. So I stopped.

In the following months, as the pace of AI advances only accelerated, it became increasingly clear that I needed to step back and question my most basic assumptions: What is knowledge? What is intelligence? What is the point of effort? What is our purpose as human beings in a world being transformed by AI?

This questioning wasn’t limited to my work. I soon found myself in the midst of an existential crisis – in my relationship with ambition, the future, my role as a parent, and my own self-worth. Maybe you can relate. I had to return to the bedrock of who I am and what I stand for (the process I followed and the answers I arrived at are the subject of my next book, Life in Perspective, out in November).

It’s now been 1,200 days since ChatGPT shattered my conception of what the future might hold. I’ve spent those three years deeply obsessed with the topic – watching, reading, experimenting, and learning as much as I possibly can about how AI changes our productivity, thinking, and creativity.

Then, something happened on February 5, 2026, that marked a new chapter in the story. The two leading AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, released new models that, for all practical purposes, matched or exceeded human performance on much of the work we do on computers.

But it wasn’t just the models. It was that they were paired with a new kind of working environment – an “agent harness” – that enables them to read your files, use tools, and take real action on your computer, not just in a chat. Claude Code and OpenAI Codex have demonstrated that it is no longer just the raw intelligence of the model that matters, but the tools and environment it has access to (just as with humans).

As long as AI was mostly about chatting, you couldn’t build a system around it. Each conversation was temporary and fleeting, hobbled by a short attention span that got wiped clean with every new conversation. Without a long-term memory, the knowledge you were creating with it couldn’t persist and compound. Without context, it couldn’t arrive at genuinely new and useful insights. Without tools, it couldn’t do much with the information it had access to, besides tell you what to do with it.

The new generation of AI harnesses represent the fulfillment of the dream I first wrote about in 2015: “a cognitive exoskeleton, both protecting us from the ravages of forgetfulness and amplifying our blows as we take on creative challenges.”

AI isn’t meant to replace human labor or judgment with supposedly “autonomous” agents. It’s meant to amplify human ability, so we can act more powerfully, more sustainably, and with more ease and joy in pursuit of the things that already matter to us. 

That’s what the entire Second Brain movement has always been about – using technology to lighten our cognitive burden so there’s more capacity for exploration, for creativity, for growth, for play. We are seeking a system that gives us more time, attention, and energy than it requires in upkeep.

In 2021, I wrote in my book Building a Second Brain: “I began to see my as-yet-unnamed Second Brain not just as a notetaking tool but as a loyal confidant and thought partner. When I was forgetful, it always remembered. When I lost my way, it reminded me where we were going. When I felt stuck and at a loss for ideas, it suggested possibilities and pathways.”

At the time, the concept of having “a digital confidant and thought partner” was a metaphor. Now it is a concrete reality. I spend much of my day working with an AI collaborator that intimately knows my business, my values, my writing style, and my current projects – and can advise me on the most subtle aspects of my work, my health, my finances, and my goals.

Finally, we stand at the threshold of the true possibility of creating an AI-powered Second Brain. Everything we’ve done until now in the realm of Personal Knowledge Management was only a prelude to this moment.

At the same time, so much of the content and conversation I see around AI these days troubles me deeply. It’s all presented with so much hype, so much manic urgency, as if you must drop what you’re doing and adopt the latest trick this very instant, or you’ll be left behind and join the permanent underclass.

If there’s one thing my experiences with AI have taught me, it’s that there is far more nuance, complexity, and troubleshooting required than almost any AI content creator will lead you to believe. There are unavoidable tradeoffs, hidden limitations, and tons of tacit knowledge needed to make effective use of AI, and it’s only growing with the proliferation of more powerful tools like Claude Code. 

It’s never as fast as they say, or as easy as they say, to get value out of AI. The potential is real, but it takes significant preparation, careful consideration, and extensive trial and error with different approaches to build a system that works for you, as it always has. There are no shortcuts or off-the-shelf solutions that automatically fit how your mind works.

There’s another point on which I differ from most AI pundits: I’m confident we have plenty of time. The history of our relationship with information – from papyrus to hard drives – has evolved over centuries and millennia, and won’t be completely upended in the next 36 months. In 5 years, we’ll still have jobs, take our kids to school, create art, and make money. The same will be true in 10 years. Social change happens much more slowly than technological change.

I see everyone around me increasingly dividing themselves into two camps: those who reject or ignore AI because they don’t have time or know where to start, and those who are frantically trying to keep up with everything, and feeling overwhelmed by FOMO. In a way, both groups are succumbing to the same pitfall: falling prey to urgency, overwhelm, and panic fueled by fear.

When you give in to fear, learning stops. You lose your sense of perspective and start making poor decisions rooted in short-term survival. And that is exactly the opposite of the attitude you need right now – to face this new future with open-mindedness, curiosity, and a long-term horizon.

You have time – but that also raises the question, what will you do with this time? You are early – an estimated 84% of the world population still hasn’t adopted generative AI. If you pay for any AI product, you are among the less than 1 in 100 people who do so worldwide. Right now, you are in the 1%.

Use this opportunity calmly, but use it wisely. Make conscious decisions about who you want to learn from and with, how you want to invest your time and attention, and start laying the groundwork to take advantage of this incredible time, when the “cognitive tax” that has always been part of human labor is finally being abolished.

After three years of preparation, I’m incredibly proud to announce our new live, cohort-based training program, The AI Second Brain. The first cohort will take place over 3 weeks of intensive, hands-on, community-centric learning, taught by me personally from April 15 to May 1. I’ll teach you how to build a complete, customized, AI-powered Second Brain based on the best of everything I’ve learned at the frontier of AI’s capabilities.

My books Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method will reach 500,000 copies sold worldwide this year. Our YouTube channel has been viewed more than 18 million times. I doubt there is anyone else who has introduced more people around the world to the potential and practice of extending human cognition with technology.

If you’re a mid-career professional who’s been using ChatGPT or Claude regularly but suspects you’re only scratching the surface, or you’re feeling left behind by the frantic pace of AI progress and don’t have hundreds of hours to figure it out on your own, this is for you. My team and I collectively spend over 100 hours per week immersed in AI – allow us to compress all that knowledge and experience into about 14 hours for you so you can speedrun the maze of options and leapfrog to the current edge of what’s possible with AI today.

The time has come to build on everything we’ve learned and created together over the last decade – to revisit and reinvent what it means to realize our potential in the age of AI.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share with you the most valuable, counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned about what it means concretely to build a Second Brain with AI via a series of emails personally written by me. Including:

  • Why the people getting the least value from AI are often the ones spending the most time on it
  • Why Personal Context Management is replacing Personal Knowledge Management – and the new bottleneck isn’t AI capability, but your ability to give AI the right information at the right time
  • Why the emphasis on execution and autonomy is misplaced, and a better use for AI is to think more clearly and make better decisions
  • The research showing that individuals working with AI can now match the performance of entire teams — and what that means for how work is about to be reorganized and which skills will matter
  • The four ways your AI’s “memory” silently degrades over time – and why bigger context windows actually make this worse, not better (and how to fix it)
  • What I mean when I say your personal notes and files are about to become your most valuable professional asset, and what you can do to leverage them

I’ll teach you the most helpful approaches and perspectives I’ve found, based on extensive trial and error, as well as surprising conclusions that go against nearly everything I’m hearing on social media. 

The founding cohort of The AI Second Brain opens for enrollment on March 26. I can promise you it’s going to be a wild, fun ride alongside some of the most interesting, generous, inspiring people you can imagine. Sign up below if you’d like to be part of the next era of the Second Brain movement: