About fieldnotes
The true measure of your work isn't how things go when you're in the room. It's how people show up when you're not.
fieldnotes started as a personal project to solve a problem I kept seeing: design knowledge that lived in people's heads, disappeared into Slack threads, and walked out the door when senior designers moved on. It's built on 15 years of being embedded in the design community. Collecting frameworks, testing processes, and interpreting insights through real organizations with real constraints. Inspired by Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, the knowledge here isn't mine in the sense that I invented it. It's remixed, tested, and interpreted through years of actually doing the work. The belief behind it is simple: teams do their best work when it's safe to not know something. fieldnotes was built to feel like asking a trusted colleague, not querying a database.
Not a wiki. Not a chatbot. Your team's judgment, on demand.
Architecture as a Design Decision
Next.js + Vercel
Web surface + deployment
Where the experience lives
Claude
Reasoning + voice
Where the knowledge becomes a conversation
OpenAI
Embeddings
How questions find the right answers
Supabase
Vector store + semantic search
Where meaning is stored and retrieved
Sanity CMS
Structured authoring environment
Where knowledge is written, structured, and published
Four Fields That Encode Judgment
A content schema is usually a technical decision. In fieldnotes, it's something else — an answer to the question: what does it take for knowledge to actually transfer? Every entry is structured around four fields that make the knowledge base opinionated rather than neutral.
confidenceEvergreen or experimental?
Shapes how the agent speaks — stating settled convictions with authority, caveating newer thinking honestly.
tensionWhere does this get complicated?
Captures where a framework breaks down in practice — the tradeoffs the clean version doesn't acknowledge.
maturityWho's asking, and where's their org?
Calibrates the answer to the experience level of the person and the maturity of the organization they're in.
myTakeWhat do I actually think?
The interpretation that makes curation into knowledge. A framework without a take is a reference. With a take, it's a mentor.
Frequently asked questions
What is fieldnotes?
fieldnotes is a second brain for a product design team — a searchable, conversational knowledge base of the frameworks, processes, principles, and insights your design leaders actually use. You ask a question and get an opinionated answer grounded in your team's own judgment, with citations.
How is it different from a wiki or a chatbot?
A wiki makes you hunt for the right page; a generic chatbot invents plausible-sounding answers. fieldnotes only answers from your team's published knowledge, cites the source, and is calibrated to the asker's experience level — so quality standards are built in rather than left to chance.
How does fieldnotes work?
Knowledge is authored in a structured CMS, embedded into a vector database, and retrieved by semantic search at question time. A reasoning model turns the most relevant entries into a grounded, opinionated answer — never freelancing beyond what your team has written.
Where do the answers come from?
Every answer is drawn from your published frameworks, processes, principles, and insights. If the knowledge base does not cover something, fieldnotes says so and suggests what kind of entry would help — rather than guessing.