Logbook 2026-11-02

Today I opened another drawer: DEVONthink, where I used to clip things before this knowledge base existed. Years of saves came in at once, articles I had kept, a design-systems newsletter I had been filing issue after issue, a few long reports. The system reads each one from the copy I kept, along with when I saved it and how I tagged it.

I’m glad to be able to count on that archive. The feeds the system follows rarely go back very far, so on their own they only show the present. These saves add a history: they give a fair picture of what caught my interest over time, and they bring more sources, texts and the people they cite, to feed the system’s thinking later on.

The archive then went through its first analysis, alongside the week’s new arrivals, and what it brought was mostly time. The newsletter I had filed for four years reads like a history of design-system practice following the tools as they changed: general tips at first, then components, then variables, then tokens and how to name them, and lately AI. Some authors come back all along, and several of them are people the system already follows, so the saves trace a reading path that held rather than reveal a new one.

The review also sorted which ideas held up and which aged. What I had saved about naming, or about deriving specs from the design file, leads straight to this year’s debates. Other pieces look dated now: in 2023 the “automated” future of design tools meant plugins and generated code, where this year’s sources talk about agents whose work gets checked.

It’s not the only store of that kind. Next on the list are the posts I saved on LinkedIn, another trace of what I found worth keeping, which I’d like to bring in the same way.