Understanding & inspiration
Most software remembers by keeping everything and forgetting nothing, which is not how anything alive remembers. Boswell took its cues from adaptive networks in nature, the science of forgetting, the moment a mind recognizes what matters, and the quiet step between the moment and the record. On askboswell.com, Boswell listens for four turns and then shows what it kept. This page is where that behavior comes from.
// WHAT RUNS TODAY
Boswell v3 is the invitation-only private beta running on Atlas: tenant-scoped branches, commits, bookmarks, tasks, graph trails, search, and recall, reached over the Model Context Protocol and used today inside Claude Code and Codex workflows. The four-turn introduction on askboswell.com is its public face: a short conversation, then a page built from what was said.
Boswell 6 brings an archive pipeline with curation and provenance. It is in development; what it does will be shown when it is ready.
// 01 — EMERGENCE
In 2010, researchers in Japan placed oat flakes on a map in the pattern of the cities around Tokyo and let a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, find its way between them. In about a day the organism had grown a network of tubes that matched the region's rail system for cost, efficiency, and resilience. No brain, no plan. Just paths that thickened where they were used and thinned where they were not.
That is the first idea Boswell is built on. Relationships between memories are real, weighted things. The ones you travel strengthen. The ones you leave alone fade. Over time the shape of your memory comes to look like the shape of your work.
What it feels likeWhen Boswell brings something back, it is because you have been there before.
Tero et al., “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,” Science 327 (2010).
// 02 — DECAY
The science of spaced repetition found something people already knew: a memory that gets used stays, and one that doesn't fades, unless it mattered enough to be marked. Modern schedulers model this with two quantities, how retrievable a memory is right now and how stable it has become. Boswell's trail scheduler runs an FSRS-inspired Boswell curve, R(t) = (1 + t/(9S))^-1, that lets passing remarks quiet down while decisions hold their weight.
Retention is also a matter of respect. Important decisions are held with more stability than a stray observation, and the person the memory belongs to keeps the controls: correct it, export it, or let it go.
What it feels likeA year on, the reason behind a decision is still there. The chatter around it has settled.
Open Spaced Repetition, “The Algorithm” — FSRS-6. Boswell's curve is FSRS-inspired; it is not a complete implementation of FSRS-6.
// 03 — RECOGNITION
About three hundred milliseconds after you see something that matters, your brain produces a response researchers call the P300: a small, reliable wave that says that one. It is the sound of a mind updating its picture of what is going on.
Boswell's founder, Steve Krontz, spent time with that wave at KSU BrainLab, co-authoring “Using Neural Input to Control Google Glass”: a four-command prototype that, at that stage, ran on an artificially generated brain signal while human-participant testing was underway. The idea that stayed with him was simple. A mind can act through recognition alone.
Boswell takes that as its cue for input. When a person marks something, corrects it, or reacts to it, that is the signal. The working picture updates around what they recognized.
What it feels likeSay “no, that's not it,” and the next reply already knows.
Polich, “Updating P300: An Integrative Theory of P3a and P3b,” Clinical Neurophysiology (2007).
// 04 — CONSOLIDATION
Memory is not written in the moment it happens. During rest, the hippocampus replays the day in fast bursts called sharp-wave ripples, and the experiences that get replayed are the ones that become lasting, recallable memory. The moment and the record are two different steps.
Boswell keeps them separate on purpose. A bookmark catches something quickly, in passing. Consolidation comes later, under different rules, and decides what becomes a permanent commit. Nothing has to be judged while it is still happening.
What it feels likeA note dropped mid-task can become part of the record, or quietly fade, depending on what your work does with it.
// 05 — CONSCIENCE
The last idea is Boswell's own. Picture cognition as a cone that widens as it rises: instinct → emotion → reason → conscience → ethics. A memory action, keeping something, surfacing it, letting it go, should have passed through the upper layers, through a person's values and authority, before it counts.
In software that becomes a set of habits: every tenant's memory stays its own, authority is scoped, every memory carries its provenance, doubtful material is quarantined rather than recalled by default, and there is always a human in the loop and a history to audit.
What it feels likeBoswell remembers with you, not about you.
The shortest way to understand it is to have the conversation. Four turns, then a page built from what was said.
Tell Boswell about yourself → Live status