About Field Notes
Field Notes is a private reading-first interface for Jason Shen's personal knowledge base — eighteen years of newsletters, coaching work, essays, book notes, and reflections, organized into an interlinked wiki you can walk through one article at a time.
What's inside
The archive is drawn from Jason's own writing and recording — the jasonshen.com newsletter (back to the first issues), notes and transcripts from coaching sessions and workshops with founder clients, essays on Asian American identity (the Asian American Man Study), the Deep Ambition research, book notes from roughly 120 academic and trade titles, and a long trail of Evernote clippings, daily reflections, and writing drafts.
None of that raw material is browsable as a daily surface. It's the fuel. An AI workflow distills it into 129 curated wiki articles across six chapters — each article a substantive synthesis, not a bullet-point summary, with [[wikilinks]] tying related ideas together. The six chapters:
- coaching · 26 — coaching philosophy, cofounder conflict (the most developed specialty), Ed Batista distillations, case studies
- business · 14 — startups, sales, product-market fit, positioning, founder mode
- frameworks · 47 — mental models, coined concepts, psychology, behavior change, motivation
- identity · 7 — Asian American writing, outlier identity
- performance · 16 — athletics, fitness, sleep, brain plasticity, gymnastics
- personal · 19 — family, philosophy, writing voice, book projects, the Deep Ambition thesis
The LLM knowledge base pattern
The structure borrows from Andrej Karpathy's sketch of a personal LLM knowledge base: raw sources in one folder, an LLM-compiled wiki in another, and three core operations — ingest (fold new raw into existing articles), query (read the wiki, synthesize an answer, file the result), and lint (periodic health checks: dead links, orphans, contradictions).
When a new source contradicts an existing claim, the wiki doesn't silently overwrite — it inserts a [!contradiction] callout naming both sources so later reading can resolve it. The wiki is meant to accumulate judgement, not just facts.
Why this interface exists
A pile of markdown files on disk isn't a product; Obsidian renders them but doesn't invite return visits. Field Notes is the result of a design exploration — six metaphors (Commonplace Book, Constellation, Filing Cabinet, Garden, Timeline, Reading Room) narrowed to four wiki-native rebuilds, then to one: the Commonplace Book, expanded into a five-screen product and finally dressed in the Field Notes brand system.
The color grammar is strict and has a job:
- Orange — identity and state. The brand mark, the article you're reading, today's draw, the count of open drafts.
- Teal — action and link. Anything clickable: TOC entries, wikilinks, article titles, directory paths.
- Muted brown — structure. Section labels, meta, chapter numerals.
Type: Libre Caslon Text (display italic) · Inter (body) · IBM Plex Mono (meta) — all loaded via next/font.
Content changelog
Major imports — what content has landed in the KB, grouped by day. Summarized from wiki/log.md.
Release notes
How this interface got built — design exploration, milestones, and infrastructure decisions, grouped by day.
What it isn't
- It isn't the editing surface — Obsidian is still where articles get written.
- It isn't public — the responses table runs on a service role key; anyone hitting a public URL could write to it. Auth lands in Phase 1b before any real deploy.
- It isn't a feed or a dashboard. Every card is a door to one article; there are no metrics to watch.