Why Your Notes App Is Backwards (And What Karpathy Does Instead)

Most note-taking apps ask the same question: where does this go?

Folder or subfolder? Which tag? How does this connect to other notes? The assumption is that organization is the hard problem—and if you solve it well enough, your notes will become useful.

Andrej Karpathy uses a different approach. He's been using it for years. And when he wrote about it in March 2025, it made me rethink everything about how I capture ideas.

The backwards assumption

Note-taking apps assume retrieval is the goal. You write something down so you can find it later. Therefore, you need to file it correctly. Therefore, you need folders, tags, search, structure.

The problem: this front-loads all the cognitive work. Every time you capture something, you're making decisions. Where does it belong? What should I tag it? How might I want to find this later?

Karpathy noticed the cost: "Maintaining more than one note and managing and sorting them into folders and recursive substructures costs way too much cognitive bloat."

His solution wasn't to organize better. It was to stop organizing entirely.

Who is Karpathy?

Andrej Karpathy holds a PhD from Stanford, where he helped build one of the first deep learning courses under Fei-Fei Li. He was a founding member at OpenAI. He led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot as Senior Director of AI. His educational series "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" has taught hundreds of thousands of people. He now runs Eureka Labs.

This is someone who has spent his career at the intersection of complexity and clarity—teaching neural networks, teaching humans, building systems that need to work at scale. When he writes about how he actually manages his personal knowledge, it's worth paying attention.

The method: append, review, rescue

Here's the system Karpathy has used for years. It fits in three words: append, review, rescue.

The first move is to append. Whenever anything comes to mind—an idea, a todo, a quote, a shell command you keep forgetting—add it to the top of a single note. No categorization. No tagging, except for optional prefixes like read: or watch: that make filtering easier later. You capture the thought and move on with your day. The goal is to get things out of your head as fast as possible, with zero friction.

The second move is to review. Periodically, you scroll through the note and skim what's there. As new entries get appended to the top, older ones naturally sink toward the bottom—"almost as if under gravity," Karpathy writes. You're not searching for something specific. You're scanning to see what catches your attention. What still feels relevant? What sparks something when you see it again?

The third move is to rescue. When something stands out during review—an idea that still feels alive, a todo that still matters, a quote that hits different now—you copy-paste it back to the top. It gets renewed visibility, another chance to stay in your attention. Everything else keeps sinking. Not deleted. Not lost. Just deprioritized by time and attention.

That's the entire system. One note. Append. Review. Rescue.

Hold up—why does this actually work?

The instinct is to organize. Categories, tags, folders, links between notes—these feel like they're adding value. But every folder is a decision. Every tag is a taxonomy you have to maintain. Every link is a relationship you have to remember exists. The cost isn't obvious in the moment, but it compounds. You spend time managing your system instead of using it.

A single note eliminates these costs entirely. CTRL+F replaces hierarchical navigation. There's no wrong place for something because there's only one place. The anxiety of "did I file this correctly?" disappears because filing doesn't exist.

And the review process does something subtle: it turns forgetting into a feature. Ideas that don't survive repeated scrutiny sink naturally. Ideas that keep catching your eye rise back up. You don't have to decide upfront what's important—your future attention decides for you. The note becomes an attention filter, and gravity does the sorting.

Karpathy writes: "When I note something down, I feel that I can immediately move on, wipe my working memory, and focus fully on something else."

That's the payoff. Your brain stops being a holding tank. The note handles it.

How this became Gravity

I kept coming back to this blog post. The method was clear, the logic was sound, but Apple Notes—the tool Karpathy uses—wasn't designed for it. You could do append-review-rescue, but the interface worked against you. Rescuing meant selecting text, copying, scrolling back up, pasting. The physical act of review felt clunky. The tool was tolerating the method, not supporting it.

I started wondering: what would it look like if the tool was built for the method from the ground up?

The answer starts with a single stream. In Gravity, everything lives in one continuous timeline. New thoughts enter at the top, older thoughts drift down. There are no folders to navigate, no hierarchy to maintain. The stream is the whole experience.

The rescue mechanic becomes physical. During review, you swipe right on anything worth keeping top-of-mind, and it jumps back to the top instantly. Swipe left to archive something when you're done with it. The gestures are tactile, satisfying, fast. What was a multi-step copy-paste operation becomes a single flick.

Capture is frictionless by default. Open the app and you're already typing. No navigation, no menus, no decisions about where to put something. The stream is always ready.

I called it Gravity because the metaphor is the method: thoughts sink over time unless you lift them back up.

What you give up—and what you gain

There are no folders in Gravity. No tags, though you can use prefixes like todo: or read: for quick filtering. No complex hierarchies. No plugin ecosystem. No bidirectional links or knowledge graphs.

If you love building intricate second brains, connecting ideas across documents, maintaining a personal wiki—this isn't that tool. Gravity makes no attempt to be a workspace for everything.

What you gain is a tool that matches how the append-and-review method actually feels. The cognitive load drops to near zero. You can focus on thinking instead of organizing. The interface disappears, leaving you with a stream and your thoughts.

Gravity is for the person who's tired of maintaining a note-taking system. Who wants to capture quickly and trust that what matters will surface. Who's noticed that most organization is procrastination in disguise—a way of feeling productive without actually thinking.

Karpathy's note has grown giant over years. He writes that it feels nice to scroll through old thoughts, to see what occupied him a long time ago. Sometimes ideas don't stand the repeated scrutiny of review and they sink deeper. Sometimes he's surprised how long he's thought about something. And sometimes an idea from a while ago becomes suddenly relevant in a new light.

That's what Gravity is designed to enable. One stream. Append at the top. Let the important stuff rise. Let the rest sink.

Try it at gravitynotes.app.