[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":253},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-why-ai-chat":3,"related-building-capacities-how-it-started-how-we-developed-tables":61},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorKey":6,"body":7,"category":39,"date":40,"dateFormatted":41,"description":42,"extension":43,"icon":44,"iconColor":44,"imagePath":45,"keywords":46,"meta":50,"navigation":51,"path":52,"readingTime":53,"relatedArticles":54,"seo":58,"stem":59,"__hash__":60},"blog/blog/why-ai-chat.md","Why did we add an AI chat to Capacities, although ChatGPT already exists?","steffen",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":35},"minimark",[10,14,17,20,23,26,29],[11,12,13],"p",{},"Capacities has a built-in AI chat which you can open as a small window next to your notes. You can use your current note as context; you can apply commands like \"Critique my thinking,\" rephrase your questions and add the results back to your notes. Here are some thoughts about why we decided to do it that way.",[11,15,16],{},"First: Context switching is costly. We do a lot of work in and with our notes. We think, create, and have questions. Leaving our thinking context is distracting and increases cognitive load. We want to use an assistant while we're working on our notes. We don't want to copy/paste and switch windows. By having a chat right next to our notes, we can compare different results or replace our version with a single click.",[11,18,19],{},"We decided to use a chat because we think conversations are essential to working with Generative AI. It rarely produces great results on the first shot. We might have follow-up questions, need to ask it to rephrase its results, or want it to justify its arguments. Once we come to a result, we can use it, but we do not simply want to rely on what we got on the first try.",[11,21,22],{},"Some conversations are so insightful or helpful that we want to store them. Capacities allows you to capture a conversation as an object, tag it, and add it to your notes. AI conversations become part of your knowledge base. You can reference them and come back if needed.",[11,24,25],{},"And last, but most important: LLMs can hallucinate; they don't know us; they don't know what we work on and what your context is. They have flaws, and we need to be aware of that. But: We can also substantially improve its results by giving it some context about us, our knowledge, and what we work on. At the moment, you can use your current note as a context. In the future, the AI will be able to use all your notes and resources to assist us. We can encourage it to prove its argument, cite its sources, and draw conclusions based on facts and data.",[11,27,28],{},"Exciting times ahead!",[11,30,31],{},[32,33,34],"em",{},"By the way, I used the AI Assistant to sharpen and develop my thoughts here. I did not use it to write my essay. We can use LLM to generate a lot of content, but we can also use it to improve our own thinking and increase the quality of our own work. It's you who chooses how you use it.",{"title":36,"searchDepth":37,"depth":37,"links":38},"",2,[],"team-product","2024-04-05","April 5, 2024","Here are some thoughts about why we decided to integrate an AI chat into Capacities.","md",null,"/blog/why-ai-chat.jpg",[47,48,49],"Generative AI","ChatGPT","AI Chat",{},true,"/blog/why-ai-chat","3 min",[55,56,57],"building-capacities","how-it-started","how-we-developed-tables",{"title":5,"description":42},"blog/why-ai-chat","qpq76uOBuiJJVn4wZWuTQyxs8UuTXKarBDkJe5CiQ7I",[62,111,172],{"id":63,"title":64,"authorKey":6,"body":65,"category":39,"date":96,"dateFormatted":97,"description":98,"extension":43,"icon":44,"iconColor":44,"imagePath":99,"keywords":100,"meta":103,"navigation":51,"path":104,"readingTime":105,"relatedArticles":106,"seo":108,"stem":109,"__hash__":110},"blog/blog/building-capacities.md","How we decide which new features to add",{"type":8,"value":66,"toc":94},[67,70,73,76,79,82,85,88,91],[11,68,69],{},"We often get asked how we decide which features we add to @CapacitiesHQ. 🗺️",[11,71,72],{},"Here’s the answer. 👇",[11,74,75],{},"Very important: Every feature starts with a need or problem. There should never be a feature if it’s not solving a real problem. This cannot be stressed enough. Otherwise, you’re building a product with no real value and a lot of clutter.",[11,77,78],{},"We draw most feature inspiration from our community's feedback and by using the product ourselves. This helps us identify problems and friction points that stop users from getting their work done. We sometimes joke that our community is our first employee: a rigorous tester, opinion consolidator, and key source of inspiration.",[11,80,81],{},"Feature requests and explicit product improvements can be added to our feedback board, voted and commented on by other users. We review and cluster all requests and analyze their importance. This helps us to get a better understanding of the different needs and problems of our users.",[11,83,84],{},"In long and intense discussions, we combine all requests, comments, and ideas with our intuition and vision for what Capacities should become. We always radically aim for usefulness and simplicity – Capacities should just work and help, nothing else.",[11,86,87],{},"When features are big and fundamental, we share proposals or plans in our community for feedback. This ensures that we constantly have our users at the table with us. We fine-tune and iterate until we find a draft that fits into the greater picture.",[11,89,90],{},"Then we start creating. After a first draft, we introduce an early version to a small, selected group of alpha testers. In intense and incredibly helpful discussions, we optimize the last 20% in a combined effort. We refine the feature by addressing issues, polishing details, and enhancing interactions.",[11,92,93],{},"After a feature is released to all users, it’s not done. We constantly improve, iterate, and measure how it fits into users' workflows. Every feature is part of a continuous evolution of the overall product. We constantly strive to build a unified and consistent product – a beautiful environment to think and work in: a Studio for your Mind.",{"title":36,"searchDepth":37,"depth":37,"links":95},[],"2024-03-04","Mar 6, 2024","What's our decision making process? Here's the answer.","/blog/building-capacities.jpg",[101,102],"Feature development","Build in public",{},"/blog/building-capacities","2 min",[107,56],"why-the-name-capacities",{"title":64,"description":98},"blog/building-capacities","yUEsybivkdEpilRjL0YjnGhgRSjIYeDYSFuYsPOVPcQ",{"id":112,"title":113,"authorKey":6,"body":114,"category":39,"date":159,"dateFormatted":160,"description":161,"extension":43,"icon":44,"iconColor":44,"imagePath":162,"keywords":163,"meta":166,"navigation":51,"path":167,"readingTime":105,"relatedArticles":168,"seo":169,"stem":170,"__hash__":171},"blog/blog/how-it-started.md","Why did we decide to build Capacities?",{"type":8,"value":115,"toc":157},[116,128,131,134,137,140],[11,117,118,119,123,124,127],{},"Everything started at university in Germany. Michael and I studied computer science and electrical engineering and realized this big divide between the ",[120,121,122],"strong",{},"technologies we were learning about"," and the ",[120,125,126],{},"technologies we were learning with",".",[11,129,130],{},"It struck us how unnatural most processes were: exchanging files, monolithic large documents, presentations, etc. We knew that there must be a better way. Today's technologies are so powerful. We knew we could build something simple and intuitive yet powerful and versatile. Something so natural that all friction and issues magically disappear, something that does not force us into adjusting our thinking to it but something that is an extension of ourselves.",[11,132,133],{},"All solutions out there did not meet what we had in mind. Some where based on traditional principles; they inherit a lot of biases from computer architectures: Folders, files, tables, and hierarchies. Others were complicated to get started with, had overwhelming degrees of freedom, or required commands and special syntax. They were not simple enough.",[11,135,136],{},"We decided to start from scratch. We threw away all assumptions about computers and how we work with them. We started with the human being in the center and got inspired by our natural way of interacting with our environment. That’s where everything started.",[11,138,139],{},"Read more:",[141,142,143,151],"ul",{},[144,145,146],"li",{},[147,148,150],"a",{"href":149},"/about/principles","Our principles",[144,152,153],{},[147,154,156],{"href":155},"/about/manifesto","Our manifesto",{"title":36,"searchDepth":37,"depth":37,"links":158},[],"2024-03-13","Mar 13, 2024","Knowledge work can be overwhelming. There must be a better way, so we decided to do it ourselves.","/blog/how-it-started.jpg",[164,165],"Origin story","Knowledge management",{},"/blog/how-it-started",[107,55],{"title":113,"description":161},"blog/how-it-started","FFhq00AomCENeh-0oz0gzxW2I7k72YKgMY0Sd5-HBhk",{"id":173,"title":174,"authorKey":175,"body":176,"category":240,"date":241,"dateFormatted":242,"description":243,"extension":43,"icon":44,"iconColor":44,"imagePath":244,"keywords":245,"meta":247,"navigation":51,"path":248,"readingTime":105,"relatedArticles":249,"seo":250,"stem":251,"__hash__":252},"blog/blog/how-we-developed-tables.md","How we developed tables in Capacities","michael",{"type":8,"value":177,"toc":236},[178,181,186,189,215,218,222,225,228],[11,179,180],{},"Recently, we launched tables in Capacities. It's a major addition to our app, and we developed the whole feature in just a couple of weeks. I wanted to share a little bit about the process and why we think it's one of the best table implementations in any note-taking app.",[182,183,185],"h2",{"id":184},"figuring-out-what-to-build","Figuring out what to build",[11,187,188],{},"From the beginning, we wanted it to stand out from table implementations in other note-taking apps while making no compromise on the UI/UX side of things. So these were our requirements:",[141,190,191,197,203,209],{},[144,192,193,196],{},[120,194,195],{},"A super nice UI/UX:"," keyboard accessibility, many shortcuts, using patterns already familiar to our users.\nMaking them pretty and well-formatted: Supporting a variety of formatting options and styles that allow users to make beautiful and useful",[144,198,199,202],{},[120,200,201],{},"Deep integration into the app:"," part of PDF export, rich-text in table cells, seamless copy and paste, linking to any content from within table cells, saving tables as objects, interaction with the AI assistant, familiar formatting options, export to CSV, reusing UI patterns our users already know, saving important tables as objects. For example, the table in this screenshot was generated by our AI assistant in the app.",[144,204,205,208],{},[120,206,207],{},"A powerful extra feature:"," We added formulas like in Excel to make it stand out from other note-taking apps. It allows for a whole range of new use cases. While this will never replace a tool like excel, it is very useful for doing some calculations and the fly and have them right inside your note-taking app. This also works great as a \"Pro\" feature.",[144,210,211,214],{},[120,212,213],{},"Being versatile:"," Having a flexible data model that is not too rigid and structured. Supporting simple inline tables for layout purposes all the way to tables-as-objects that users can open in full-page and revisit frequently.",[11,216,217],{},"We found that this is a combination that is not present in any other note-taking app and really makes @CapacitiesHQ\nstand out.",[182,219,221],{"id":220},"how-we-built-it","How we built it",[11,223,224],{},"We made the table feature the main project of a new employee. While this sounds risky, it allowed us to go the extra mile because he could spend all his time and effort on this one feature. We could then completely polish it with the input from the rest of the team. This focus gave us an enormous speed.",[11,226,227],{},"Another thing that made us super fast on the development side was reusing as much code and as many concepts as possible that already existed in the code base. This also allowed our new dev to get to know the codebase, use powerful abstractions, and learn by imitating what was already there.",[11,229,230,231,235],{},"Feel free to check out our new ",[147,232,234],{"href":233},"/whats-new/release-35","table implementation"," and let us know what you think!",{"title":36,"searchDepth":37,"depth":37,"links":237},[238,239],{"id":184,"depth":37,"text":185},{"id":220,"depth":37,"text":221},"dev","2024-03-11","Mar 11, 2024","Explaining our process and why we think it's one of the best table implementations in any note-taking app.","/blog/how-we-developed-tables/tables-cover.jpg",[101,246],"tables",{},"/blog/how-we-developed-tables",[55],{"title":174,"description":243},"blog/how-we-developed-tables","7fMYgPlcRfO9nXtEwOP-Tan_98apOd_KgV8I6kjoa_8",1776250824392]