When Old Things Take On New Meaning in the Age of AI (Bite-size Article)

Introduction — On What I've Been Writing for Years This is a follow-up to my previous post on Claude and MCP . Just sharing some recent thoughts. Personally, I've always enjoyed keeping records and analyzing my own work. So for years, I've been logging my daily tasks, jotting down thoughts, hesitations, and impressions in notes. I've drawn on these records for reviews, analysis, and decisions on various projects. The tools have shifted over time — Evernote, Notion, Logseq, Taskuma, and so on — but the habit itself, of writing notes into some app or tool, has stayed with me for years. What Happened with MCP I recently wrote about connecting Notion and Google Docs through MCP, and the results have surprised even me. I won't repeat the details here since they're in that post, but ever since I introduced MCP, the flow of information has accelerated dramatically. In particular, I'd been accumulating reviews, task management notes, and brainstorms in Notion for years, and letting Claude read all of this has shifted the meaning of what I'd previously written. When I first started recording in Notion, it never occurred to me that it might be useful to AI. Of course — I had no way to imagine a time when AI would become this close to everyday life, used in this way. I was just writing for plain, analog reasons — "so I could look back later," "so I could organize my own thinking." But the moment MCP made it all readable, the feeling shifted. It's as if my past self comes forward to help my current self. Claude answers my current questions while drawing on the reasoning behind old project decisions, or on impressions I'd noted at the time. I've had moments like that more than once now. Thinking about it: the human brain's memory has limits — even the person who wrote something forgets it quickly. That's why I kept taking notes, leaving behind my thoughts and conclusions at each point in time as a record. And now, in the flow of conversation, AI reads from those records, distill