Recommended reading & watching
Short and opinionated, not a link dump. Ten things worth your time if you are building your own AIOS.
Every item below has a one-line "read this if" so you can skip the ones that do not match where you are right now. The order is roughly the order I would read them in, not a ranking.
Building a Second Brain
Tiago Forte
Read this if you want the foundation of why a personal knowledge system works. The PARA structure your vault is built on starts here.
Getting Things Done — Weekly Review
David Allen Company
Read this if your AIOS is going stale. The weekly loop is borrowed straight from here — get clear, get current, get creative.
Building effective agents
Anthropic
Read this if you want to understand the difference between a workflow and an agent before you build either.
Agent Skills
Anthropic
Read this if 'skill' still feels vague. The official explanation of why a folder of instructions beats re-explaining the same task every session.
Model Context Protocol — official docs
modelcontextprotocol.io
Read this if you want to actually wire your AI to your real tools. The protocol your tools layer runs on.
Official MCP Registry
Model Context Protocol
Use this once the curated 11 stop being enough. The long tail of MCP servers, kept current by the people who own the spec.
modelcontextprotocol/servers
GitHub
Use this when you want to see how a server is built, or you need the reference implementations of Filesystem, Fetch, and Memory.
Claude — model docs
Anthropic
Read this if Claude is your daily driver. Skills, tool use, and context limits explained by the people who built it.
ChatGPT — Memory & Custom Instructions
OpenAI Help Center
Read this if you use ChatGPT. The official explanation of what its memory actually does, and where the constitution-equivalent lives.
Linus Lee — Building a personal knowledge graph
thesephist.com
Read this if you want to see what a hand-rolled second brain looks like from someone who actually built one for himself, not as a product pitch.
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