Ideas we refused to let stay ideas

The most valuable thing you know never becomes a note — it's too obvious to you to bother writing down. Passive apps (Notion, Obsidian, Notes) only ever capture what you remember to type. Eco does the opposite: it interviews you to pull out the judgment, the heuristic, the pattern you recognize but never put into words — then turns it into an agent that reasons the way you do. Not a note database. A version of you that thinks.

• An interviewer that doesn't wait — instead of waiting for you to write, Eco asks. It uses the critical-incident method to pull out experience you'd never think to record on your own.
• Real provenance — every extracted idea keeps its original quote and a link back to the source note. No hallucinating: the agent can only cite what actually lives in your brain.
• A living knowledge graph — topics as hubs, ideas as nodes, connected by wikilinks and semantic similarity, navigable in 3D.
• Answers in the first person — a RAG agent talks to you citing your own ideas with clickable [n] links. When context is missing, it hands you back a note: "teach me this."

AI amplifies whoever uses it — a weak thinker with AI just produces weak thinking, faster. Gadfly is built against that. It's a cognitive trainer, not an assistant: named after Socrates, who called himself a gadfly, the sting that keeps a mind from settling into comfort. It never hands you a finished answer if you haven't done the reasoning first — it's a trainer, not a wheelchair.

• A Socratic opponent for logic — instead of answering your question, it asks what your own argument is, then attacks its weakest point until you've defended or revised it.
• A provocateur for creativity — it won't write the thing for you. It hands back constraints, absurd combinations, and inversions until you've produced your own rough drafts.
• A stress-test for judgment — before any decision, it hunts for the blind spots, biases, and strongest counter-case you haven't considered — then lets you decide.
• Gets harder as you get better — tracks your training across pillars, escalates difficulty as you improve, and isn't shy about calling out skills you've let go soft.