Cognir — Stop Forgetting What You Read

3 min read Original article ↗

Reading environment · Local-first · No servers

Turn what you read into a map of connected ideas.

We are using AI the wrong way. AI should augument thinking, not replace it. You annotate. AI builds your Zettelkasten. A 3D graph shows how your thoughts connect. Everything runs in your browser — nothing leaves your machine.

Try it — select (double-click) any word below to annotate it

You forget 90% of what you read within a week. Probably because you let a chat-bot do the thinking and summarizing for you. Most note-taking apps help you collect that information. Cognir helps you think about it — every annotation becomes a node, every connection becomes structure, and your scattered reading becomes a living map of your compound knowledge.

Select any word above ↑

Two nodes connected. That's how your map starts. This gets much more complex when you have thousands of them!


How it works

01 —

Import or write anything

Drop a PDF, paste a URL, or just start typing. Cognir doesn't care about format — it cares about what you think about what you read.

02 —

Select text. Write your reaction.

Highlight any sentence. Write your actual thought — not a summary, your reaction. That annotation becomes a node. Nodes become your map.

03 —

Watch your thinking organize itself

AI finds connections across everything you've annotated. The 3D graph updates. Export your Zettelkasten as prose, bullets, or a report — no blank page.


Read

Import anything

PDFs, web pages, or plain text. The reader is distraction-free by design. Every paragraph is a potential node waiting to be thought about.

Annotate

Your actual thoughts

Select any sentence. Write what you really think. Not a summary — your reaction, your disagreement, your connection to something else. That's where knowledge starts.

Map

A living 3D graph

Watch your scattered annotations organize into a spatial network. Every connection is an insight you didn't have to dig for. Navigate your understanding in three dimensions.

Compile

No more blank page

Turn your map into a first draft. Essays, summaries, formal reports — written by you, structured by AI. The hard part (thinking) is already done.


Privacy & capability

100%

Browser-based — nothing leaves your machine

Zero

Data uploaded — no servers, no accounts

Notes stored locally via IndexedDB

4

AI providers — Groq (free), Claude, GPT, Gemini

A shared AI key is included so you can try everything immediately. If you hit API key rate limits — a growing pain as Cognir develops — getting your own free API key takes 60 seconds in Settings.

Step 1 of 3 — Input

Paste anything you've been reading

A note, an article excerpt, a brain dump — whatever's on your mind. Cognir works with how you actually think, not how you wish you did.

Edit or paste your own text above

Step 2 of 3 — Transformation

Ideas become atomic

Each sentence becomes an independent node — stripped of context, forced to stand alone. This is what makes retrieval instant and connections real.

↗ Connections detected between nodes

Step 3 of 3 — Interaction

Your knowledge, alive

Drag any node. Watch how ideas orbit each other and reveal hidden relationships. This is your Zettelkasten — always growing, never flat.

↖ Drag nodes to rearrange