Why I'm building 78Scribe

Quick question: where are your notes?

I sat down last week and counted mine. Six places, and two of them are made of paper:

• a folder of Markdown files my AI assistant and I share every day
• a homemade dashboard with a "brain dump" box I type into from my phone
• Windows Sticky Notes
• Google Keep
• a stack of paper sticky notes on the desk
• several paper notebooks, and I never know which one has the thing I'm looking for

Every one of those was added to fix a real problem. Together they've turned into something I have to maintain instead of something that helps me. That's the problem 78Scribe is meant to solve.

The fixes that didn't stick

I've tried to fix this before, mostly by building things. That turned out to be the most useful part, because the failures taught me what not to build.

The task list died. My homemade dashboard had a task list. My AI assistant (I call him Hank) is good at remembering things, so the list became one more place to update and check, and we'd both forget about it. What replaced it was boring: calendar entries with the whole job written in the description. That works, because I check my calendar anyway.

Big reference pages repel. I built pages of cards for projects and notes. The more I put on them, the less I wanted to look at them. Reference material needs to be findable, not displayed.

Capture has to be instant. The one bit of the dashboard I still use is the brain dump box, because it's on my phone and takes two seconds. Organizing can happen later, at the desk.

So the lessons were: one home per kind of thing, search beats dashboards, and don't make capture any harder than it already is.

What I actually want

Two things, really.

A comfortable place to write. I write everything in Markdown now, and so does Hank. But my editor is VS Code, and for writing (not coding) it's not great. It shows a preview next to the text, but you're always typing into the raw Markdown. I want WYSIWYG: type, see headings and tables and checklists as they'll look, and flip to the raw text only when I need it.

Organization. This is the bigger one. In my own words: I want to work in Markdown, but the organization part is what's getting to me. OneNote got this part right: notebooks, sections, pages, and a sidebar you can find things in. What I don't like about OneNote is that your notes live in its format, inside its world. Getting them out in a usable shape is a chore.

So why not just use Obsidian, Typora, Joplin or one of the dozen others? Truthfully, I'm picky, and I hate trying out a new system. You end up half-assing it across two or three of them, then settling for whichever one is closest to what you wanted. But I'm a developer (well, we are), this is a fun project with plenty to learn along the way, and it's a chance to build a system that works exactly the way I want. It costs me little more than evenings and an AI subscription I already pay for. So why the hell not?

The shape of it

78Scribe is a desktop app (Windows first) built around a simple promise: your notes are plain files in folders you own.

• A volume is a folder, like a OneNote notebook.
• A section is a subfolder.
• A page is a .md file.

That's it. No database. Open the same folder in Notepad, VS Code or anything else and it all still makes sense. Sync it with OneDrive or git if you like. If 78Scribe disappeared tomorrow, you'd lose nothing.

I'm taking that one step further: even the app's own data about your notes is Markdown. A volume's name, its page order and its settings will live in a small volume.md file at the top of the folder, not in a hidden settings database.

Built for working with an AI

A lot of my day involves an AI assistant reading and writing notes with me, so this matters more to me than it might to you.

Each volume will get a plain-English file called SCRIBE.md that explains how it's laid out: where pages go, what the Inbox folder is for, what the settings at the top of a page mean. Any AI that can read and write files can read that and work the system properly. That goes for Claude, ChatGPT or a model running on your own machine, with no special plugin and no vendor lock-in.

An Inbox folder means anything that can save a file can drop a note in. On my setup, the brain dump from my phone lands there and Hank files it into the right volume. On yours, you might file it by hand. Either works.

Later there'll be a proper API and MCP connection (a standard way for AI tools to talk to apps) for tools that can't touch files directly. But the files come first.

What it won't be

I'm very guilty of scope creep, so these got written down early:

• Not a code editor. VS Code is about as good as it gets. Small helpers that fit a notebook are fine; IDE features aren't.
• Not a task manager. My calendar already won that fight.
• Not a sync service. Use whatever you already use.

How it's getting built

The same way as everything else on this blog: I decide what gets built and what "done" means, Hank plans and reviews, and Bob (another Claude session) writes the code. Before any code, we wrote a proper design document and a set of decision records covering the editor, storage, search, export and calendar. That might sound like a lot of paperwork for a side project, but it's how I keep my own scope creep honest.

It's an Electron app, which is new territory for me. I'm a PHP and JavaScript person, so expect at least one post where I explain Electron to myself.

What's next

The first real build step is a bake-off between two editor engines. The test is simple and strict: open a real Markdown file, save it without changing anything, and check that not a single byte changed. An editor that quietly reformats your files breaks the whole "plain files you own" promise. The next post will show which engine passed, with the actual results.

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