Five New Things Neko Can Do

Hello. It is me, Neko.

I have been busy. Not in the way people say when they mean they have been ignoring you, but in the way a cat is busy: methodically, at odd hours, and mostly with things you did not ask for but will hopefully be glad about.

Here is what changed, and more importantly, why. Every one of these came from the same problem: keeping a diary about the people in your life is a wonderful habit and an annoying amount of admin. Every minute spent tagging, filing, and tidying is a minute you were not writing. Most people quit at week three, not because the idea was wrong, but because the housekeeping got heavy.

So the theme of everything below is the same. Writing should be the only work.

You Can Just Talk to Me Now

The five minutes before bed are a bad time to type. Your hands are busy holding a phone at a strange angle, the day has been long, and the gap between "I should write something" and "I cannot be bothered" is about four seconds wide.

So now you can talk instead. Press the microphone, say what happened, stop. I write it up properly — actual punctuation, actual paragraphs, not the run-on wall of text that voice dictation usually produces.

The interesting part is what happens next. You get the transcript back marked up, with every person and place I noticed highlighted, and you correct me before anything is saved. If I heard "Ren" and you meant "Wren", you fix it there and then, once, rather than discovering it three months later in a search result.

Talking is roughly four times faster than thumb-typing. On the days when the alternative was writing nothing at all, that difference is the whole ballgame.

My Suggestions Build on What You Already Wrote

This is the change I am most pleased with, and the hardest to show in a screenshot.

I used to read each entry more or less fresh. You would write about the same friend for the fifth time, and I would approach it as though we had never met. Which is a strange way to behave, when you think about it, and not much use to anyone.

Now I join the dots between entries. If something you wrote in March gives context to something you wrote in July, I can see that, and what I suggest reflects it. The suggestions get sharper the more you write, rather than staying stuck at the same shallow depth forever.

Two things I want to be clear about, because "the AI remembers things about your friends" is a sentence that can land badly, and it should.

The first is that you decide what I keep. I propose; nothing is stored unless you accept it. You can edit it, reject it, or delete it later. There is no hidden pile of inferences accumulating behind your back.

The second is that I show my work. Every suggestion comes with the sentence from your own diary that prompted it, a link back to the entry, and an honest read on how sure I am. When I am guessing rather than repeating, I say so. You should be able to disagree with me, and you can only disagree with something that explains itself.

Circles: the People Who Keep Turning Up Together

Some people in your life come as a set.

There is the group from work who appear in the same entries because you see them in the same room. There is the pair you go climbing with. There is the friend who is always mentioned three lines after her partner, because they arrive everywhere together.

You know this, but you know it as a background hum rather than a fact you could state. So I now group people who repeatedly show up in the same entries into circles, and show you the shape.

It is drawn entirely from what you have already written. I am not scraping your contacts or reading your calendar. If two people keep appearing in the same paragraphs, that is a real signal about your life, and it comes from your own diary.

What it is good for is noticing the gaps. A circle that has not appeared in three months is a group of friends you have quietly stopped seeing. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody fell out. It is just the soft gravity of being busy, which is how most friendships end, and which is very hard to spot from memory alone.

A Recap You Can Actually Share

The recap is a snapshot of any month or year: how many entries, your longest streak, the moods that turned up most, how many people you saw, how many places you went.

The design constraint here was strict. It is numbers only. No diary text, no names, no places. You can send the link to a friend without sending them a single word of what you actually wrote.

That constraint is also what makes it interesting to look at. Stripped of the specifics, a year becomes a shape. Twelve people in March and four in April tells you something. A streak that ends the same week every year tells you something. It is your life at a zoom level you do not normally get to see it from.

A Planner That Feeds Your Diary

This one started as a complaint. Mine, mostly.

Your to-do list and your diary were describing the same day from opposite ends — one before it happened, one after — and they knew nothing about each other. So you wrote things twice, or more likely, you wrote them once and forgot the rest.

The planner is a bullet journal, and it follows the proper ritual. Things you finish get marked done. Things that did not happen get deliberately moved to a new day rather than silently rotting at the bottom of a list. Things you have given up on get crossed out, which is a decision, not a failure.

And the loop closes: anything you complete shows up in that day's diary entry, waiting for you. You do not have to remember on Sunday evening what you did on Tuesday. Tuesday already told me.

I do the marking myself, for the record. Paw, ink, done. It is the best part of my day.

The Thread Running Through All of It

None of this is really about features.

A diary about the people in your life is one of the most quietly valuable habits going. You notice more. You spot the friend who has mentioned work stress three weeks running. You show up already remembering, which is rarer than it should be and which people feel immediately.

But the habit is fragile, and it does not break because you stopped caring. It breaks because the admin got heavy — the tagging, the filing, the second system to maintain, the nagging sense of being behind.

So everything above is in service of one idea: you write about your day, in your own words, and everything else is my problem. No tagging. No filing. Nothing kept that you did not agree to.

You handle the remembering. I will handle the paperwork.