AI produces trillions of tokens daily—the minimal unit of text AI processes, roughly one Chinese character or half an English word—overwhelming the human brain. That's the core argument of a viral post this week on the Lobsters tech community. Its title is blunter: "Clankers Made Me Build a Second Brain." "Clankers" is programmer slang for AI, roughly "those metal clunkers." The author's answer: install a personal knowledge management system—aka a "second brain."
What this is
A "Second Brain" refers to using note-taking software like Obsidian, Notion, or Logseq to structure and store fragmented information, reading notes, and project materials—essentially an external, searchable hard drive for your brain. The concept was proposed by productivity expert Tiago Forte in the 2010s and remained a niche pursuit for years.
We've noticed that over the past six months it has clearly broken into the mainstream. The trigger is the AIGC (AI-Generated Content) flood—when machines spew out more text in a day than a person reads in a lifetime, "how do I remember" and "how do I retrieve it" become real problems. The Second Brain fills exactly that gap.
Industry view
Supporters argue this is a "re-stratification of literacy" in the AI era: many people can use AI, but very few can deposit, retrieve, and reuse AI output. The Second Brain is the infrastructure for that capability. Notion and Feishu's knowledge bases have seen renewed paid-user growth over the past two quarters, which some analysts attribute to this trend.
Opposition is equally sharp. One SaaS investor publicly questioned: "What we're seeing isn't a knowledge management revival—it's a new form of hoarding disorder." His evidence: surveys show that most users' second brains turn into "digital junkyards" after three months—records never revisited, anxiety only added. Another critique is more technical: local-first tools don't integrate AI, so their search and summarization experience lags far behind ChatGPT's conversational recall, and their value will be rapidly diluted.
Impact on regular people
For enterprise IT: knowledge management SaaS procurement budgets are rebounding. Notion, Feishu, and Coda are the main beneficiaries, and the domestic alternative FlowUs has started integrating AI summaries.
For individual professionals: the Second Brain is becoming an implicit threshold in consulting, investment research, and product management—those who can't systematically organize their materials are just "faster typewriters," no matter how fluent they are with AI.
For the consumer market: new hardware selling points are emerging—"e-ink + long battery + AI summary" notebooks (like reMarkable and the domestic brand Boox) are seeing clearly rising sales.