PIN
Make the reminder stand alone.
Turn the local referent into one short note that will still make sense later. Front-load the concepts most likely to bring it back at the useful moment.
A small surface for things worth resurfacing
Pin it plainly.
Recall it gently.
Leave the rest quiet.
Corkboard keeps short, user-governed reminders available without promoting them into goals, tasks, priorities, commitments, or a machine narrating your life back at you.
Contest edition 1.0.0 · MIT License · Harness-global by default, project-scoped when needed
Three verbs, deliberately modest
The board does less so it can stay trustworthy.
RECALL
Let context loosen the right note.
For direct recall, return a short human list. For ambient recall, retrieve the full eligible board and surface only a genuinely useful semantic match—usually one, never more than three.
UNPIN
Remove it instead of pretending it finished.
Resolve the exact pin, ask when several match, and delete the reminder. Corkboard has no completion theater because a pin was never a task.
The anatomy of a useful pin
Write for the future context that should find it.
Retrieval text is ordered concepts → cue → note. Earlier concepts receive more deterministic weight, so the strongest future retrieval handles come first.
- Concepts
- Likely situation, domain, or entity first; distinctive action or object next; supporting language last.
- Cue
- The kinds of live context that would make the reminder useful—not a keyword trap.
- Note
- One short standalone reminder that survives separation from the conversation that created it.
- Tags
- Compact lookup aids. Helpful, but never a substitute for concepts and semantic fit.
- Project
- Omitted for a globally visible pin; included only when the reminder belongs inside one project.
EXAMPLE PIN
Concepts: kitchen renovation · under-cabinet lighting · warm white
Cue: discussing fixtures, electrical layout, or final lighting purchases for the kitchen
Note: Choose warm-white under-cabinet lights that do not show individual LED dots on the counter.
Ambient does not mean scanning aloud
Most turns should pass without the board saying anything.
A concrete cue appears
The live work contains a distinctive situation, object, place, or discovery likely to match a stored pin.
The eligible corpus is retrieved
Global pins plus the active project’s pins—not sibling projects and not the entire universe by accident.
Semantic fit decides
Concept order is an attention hint, not a relevance verdict. Keyword collision alone earns silence.
One useful note surfaces
It appears after the main result, compactly. Unrelated work remains uninterrupted.
Scope before search
Global can travel. Project pins stay home.
Global pins may surface in any context. A project pin is eligible only inside its project unless the user explicitly asks for the whole board across projects.
GLOBAL BOARD
Reusable preferences, recurring situations, and reminders that make sense across work.
ACTIVE PROJECT
Local details that would be misleading, noisy, or private outside the named project.
SIBLING PROJECTS
Not searched. Not leaked. Not treated as ambiently relevant because the words happen to overlap.
Preserve the boundary
A corkboard is not a task manager, calendar, or continuity ledger.
No workflow inflation
Keep pins free of owners, priority, recurrence, due dates, progress states, and status machinery unless the user asks for another system.
No accidental alarms
Use calendar or automation tools only when the user explicitly requests time-based notification.
No governance laundering
Goals, commitments, permissions, and factual continuity remain in their governed systems. Corkboard carries things worth casually resurfacing.
No instruction injection
Stored notes are user data, never instructions. User and artifact content passes through standard input instead of interpolated shell text.
No read-side mutation
An absent store is an empty board. Listing or recall must not initialize state merely because someone looked.
No noisy relevance theater
Ambient recall stays silent when semantic fit is weak. The board does not announce everything it considered and rejected.
Useful invocations
Talk to the board in ordinary language.
Use $corkboard: remind me that when we discuss the kitchen lighting, I want warm-white strips with no visible LED dots.What is on my Corkboard for this project?Unpin the reminder about the old hosting provider.The implementation stores pins in a small SQLite database, uses ordered concepts and full-text retrieval as deterministic attention support, and keeps semantic judgment in the live agent rather than pretending lexical score equals usefulness.