I kept losing my best ideas, so I built Edmund

So here’s a normal Tuesday in my head. There’s a music project that needs a rough mix bounced. There’s the day job, which is busy in the way day jobs are busy. There are two or three side projects, all in different states of half-finished. There’s a freelance client waiting on a reply I keep meaning to write. And somewhere in amongst all of that is a Post-it note in my brain that just says “put the peg board up in Archie’s bedroom.”

Every one of those things lives somewhere different. The music stuff is in one app. Work is in Linear. A side project is in GitHub issues, another is in Notion because past-me thought that was a good idea! The freelance client wants everything in their tool. And Archie’s peg board? That’s a note on my phone I will absolutely never look at again.

The problem was never that I didn’t have anywhere to track things. It was that I had eleven anywheres, and none of them was the place I was standing when the thought actually turned up.

Because that’s the bit nobody solves. The thought never arrives when you’re sat at the right screen with the right app open. It arrives while you’re doing the washing up, or halfway through a completely different task, or driving, or the second your head hits the pillow. And you’ve got about four seconds to catch it before it’s gone. If catching it means “unlock phone, find the right app, decide which project, find the right list, type it in”, the thought wins. It’s already gone. I’ve lost more good ideas to that little bit of friction than I’ve ever lost to forgetting.

So I built the thing I wanted. It’s called Edmund!

One place to put the thought

The whole idea of Edmund is that there is exactly one thing you do: you capture the thought. Type it, or just say it out loud. That’s the entire interaction. You don’t file it, you don’t tag it, you don’t decide which project it belongs to or which app it should end up in. You get it out of your head and you get on with your day.

The filing is Edmund’s job. It reads what you captured and works out what it is and where it goes. “Rough mix sounds muddy in the low end” lands in the music project. “Client wants the invoice split across two months” goes to the right client. “Peg board, Archie’s room” becomes a reminder, because that’s what it is. You captured one thing, in one place, and it ended up in the right place without you doing the sorting.

And if a thought belongs in a tool you already live in, Edmund can send it there. Linear, GitHub, Jira, Notion, Reminders, a few others. So the note you dumped at the bus stop turns into a real Linear issue on the right team, or a GitHub issue on the right repo, without you opening either. Edmund isn’t trying to replace the tools you already use. It’s trying to be the front door to all of them, so that “catch the thought” and “put it in the right tool” stop being two separate jobs.

The clever part stays out of your way

Here’s the bit I care about most, and I’ll keep it short because it matters more than it sounds.

The AI that does the sorting runs on your device. Your thoughts don’t get shipped off to someone’s server to be read, logged, and turned into training data. There’s no account to make. There’s no sign-up, no email, no “we’ve updated our privacy policy.” You capture a thought, your phone works out where it goes, and that’s the end of the story. Nothing leaves.

I didn’t build it that way to make a point. I built it that way because it’s the only way I’d actually trust a tool with the raw, unfiltered, occasionally embarrassing contents of my own head. If I wouldn’t trust it, I can’t ask you to.

It’s a beta, and it’s genuinely early

Right, the honest bit. Edmund is not finished. It’s a private beta, it’s just me building it, and it’s the actual build I use every single day, peg board and all. That means it’s real and it works, and it also means you’ll find rough edges, because I find new ones every week.

If you like being early on things, if you’ve ever lost a good idea to the four-second friction problem, or you just want to poke at a native Apple app that takes privacy seriously and isn’t trying to sell your notes back to you, I’d genuinely love to have you in.

A few things straight, so there are no surprises:

• It’s free during the beta. No card, no catch!
• Invites go out in waves. I’m one person and I want to actually read the feedback, so I’m not flinging the doors open all at once.
• There’s no launch date. It’s done when it’s good, not when a calendar says so.
• Pricing isn’t settled. It’ll be a paid app one day, but I want to see how people actually use it before I decide what that looks like. Beta testers won’t be forgotten when I do.

If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, put your name down here: edmundapp.com/beta. I’ll be in touch as invites go out.

And if you’ve got your own version of the peg board note rotting in a notes app you’ll never open again, this is for you. What’s the thought you lost this week?

Filed under AI. No comments, on purpose.