Stacks

Who Stacks is for

For people with a reading list longer than their reading, who finish things and then cannot recall what they thought. The synthesis is for the moment you realise four different works have been circling the same idea.

What Stacks does

Stacks holds external works — books, papers, talks, courses — with a status showing what is in progress, what is queued and what is done, plus your own notes against each one. The AI synthesis is grounded in those notes rather than in the works themselves, which is a deliberate constraint: it reflects what you understood and recorded, not a summary of a book scraped from somewhere. It is the counterpart to Vault, which holds your own thinking, and Cite, which formats bibliographies — Stacks holds progress and opinion on other people’s work.

• →Reading, watching and listening statuses
• →Your own notes per work
• →AI synthesis grounded in your notes rather than the source
• →Status board across the whole shelf

How Stacks works

1. 01

   Add what you are working through

   Books, papers, talks, courses. Anything you consume rather than produce.

2. 02

   Track the status honestly

   In progress, queued, abandoned, done. An honest abandoned pile is more useful than an aspirational queue.

3. 03

   Write notes as you go

   Your own reaction and takeaways per work. This is the material everything else here is built on.

4. 04

   Synthesise across the shelf

   AI reads your notes — not the works — and surfaces where several of them are converging on the same idea.

What Stacks does not do

Stacks does not contain the works — it tracks them. There is no full text, no reader and no library integration, so it will not summarise a book you have not read; the synthesis works from your notes, and with no notes there is nothing to synthesise. It is not a citation manager either; formatted bibliographies are Cite, and your own developed ideas belong in Vault.

Common questions

Works well with