discovery through the lens of intention

why i built enzyme

Words have always been sacred to me. They have always been *enough*. I don’t need all the splash and filter. I just want something real and pure, to read something that isn’t trying to go viral. I want to get a shift of insight, to be delighted, to go inside the mind of someone and think, “Wow, how lovely their brain is.”

Writing is sacred. It’s important. It’s vital. And it doesn’t need more than this. It stands on its own. In a world obsessed with image, what a revolution to just say: here are my words in black and white, take it or leave it.

(Jamie Varon, “Dear Writer: Advice on Creating a Sacred Writing Space”)

The more I work on Enzyme, the more I realize that true discovery isn't about algorithms surfacing content – it's about preserving the intention behind what we capture. When we write something down, we're not just recording information; we're marking a moment where something resonated deeply enough to document. That intention, that subtle "why" behind what we choose to keep, is sacred ground that most AI tools plow right past in their race to generate and synthesize.

What makes Enzyme different is that it treats each captured thought as evidence of human attention and care. Rather than trying to automate away the "tedious" parts of knowledge work, it helps surface the constellation of intentions behind our notes. When you ask Enzyme to help you discover connections, you're not just getting semantic similarity – you're seeing where your mind has repeatedly chosen to pause, reflect, and record. This is why I've designed it to always preserve context and attribution, letting you trace insights back to their original moments of capture. It's less about generating new content and more about illuminating the path your curiosity has already carved.

An artist casts a line to the universe. We don’t get to choose when a noticing or inspiration comes. We can only be there to receive it. As with meditation, our engagement in the process is what allows the result. Collecting seeds is best approached with active awareness and boundless curiosity. It cannot be muscled, though perhaps it can be willed.

(Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act”)

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry

(Ted Chiang, “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art”)

In an age where tools promise to do our thinking for us, I believe we need spaces that honor the small choices that make up genuine insight. Discovery shouldn't feel like scrolling an infinite feed – it should feel like following a trail of breadcrumbs back to moments that mattered enough to write down. That's the kind of discovery I'm trying to enable with Enzyme: one that amplifies human intention rather than replacing it.