Bridge

Capture habits

Bridge's whole value proposition starts with how much you capture. The graph self-organizes only if you give it material to work with. This guide is the opinionated take on what to capture, when, and how — based on a year of using Bridge to build Bridge.

The minimum-viable habit

If you do nothing else: drop a note any time a thought leaves your head. Not when it's polished, not when you've structured it. When it leaves your head. Bridge's quick scan and auto-classification handle the rest.

A useful threshold: if the thought would otherwise have gone into a notes app, a sticky note, a draft text message you never sent, or a passing remark to no one — it belongs in Bridge.

Three good times to capture

On the commute

Walking, transit, driving (when safe to dictate). The commute is when your brain is loosest and most associative. The notes you drop on the commute tend to seed the strongest constellations.

Right after a meeting

The five minutes after a meeting ends, before you context-switch to the next thing. The implicit constraints, the half-thoughts you didn't say out loud, the related ideas that crossed your mind while listening — all of it has a shelf life of about twenty minutes before it's gone.

When you catch yourself re-thinking

If you find yourself working through the same idea for the third time in a week, you don't have an idea — you have a constellation that's trying to form. Drop notes each time. Once three or more of them cohere, a named constellation appears in the graph — that's your signal there's enough to start a venture.

What to capture

  • Half-thoughts. The ones that feel too unfinished to write down anywhere are exactly what Bridge is for. The on-capture scan and the clustering catch patterns you'd never notice yourself.
  • Constraints you'd otherwise forget. "We can't ship this without rate limiting." "The mobile app has a 10MB image upload cap." These tend to surface in 03_architecture.md and 07_scope.md when you eventually build a plan.
  • Decisions you've already made. Even if you think you'll remember, capture them. A decision in your head is invisible to your coding agent. A decision in a note is referenceable.
  • Source material. Articles you want to come back to, snippets you might pull from. These land as Reference notes and don't compete with Expandable notes for AI cost.

What to skip

  • Calendar items, todos, reminders. Bridge is not a task manager. Use the app you're already using for those.
  • Polished documents. If you're writing a Notion page or a Google Doc, leave it there. Bridge is for the upstream raw thinking, not the downstream polished output.
  • Confidential information that doesn't belong in your AI provider's logs. Your notes get sent to your AI provider when you run expansion or chat. If a note shouldn't go through an LLM, don't capture it.

When to NOT capture

If you're trying to capture an idea perfectly, you've already lost. The note is a starting point for the AI to expand, not a finished artifact. If you find yourself editing a capture for more than ten seconds, you're polishing too early. Hit save, let Bridge expand it, refine in the expansion if you need to.

Building the habit

The hardest part of any capture tool is remembering to use it. Two patterns that help:

  1. Put the quick-capture overlay on your home screen. One tap → typing → done. The friction has to be lower than not capturing.
  2. Don't read your notes back too often. The point isn't a journal you re-read. The point is material for the graph. Trust the constellations to surface what matters.

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