I built Thinking Canvas, a tool for researching the things you're curious about. The idea is to have one place for chatting, browsing, and note-taking - to remove the awkwardness at the boundaries of these apps and make it more fluid for you to explore and research.
For 1-2 hour explorations, I think this tool is pretty useful! You can see chats side by side and fork them. You can browse Google or chat with Claude. You can read webpages and PDFs. You can connect a webpage or PDF to a chat, and the chat will have it as context.
The problem is that when you return to a project a day later, it might feel like clutter. There are too many words and too little signal. It's a Jackson Pollock in the Bauhaus suite.
One problem is that note-taking doesn't really belong here. If I am learning something new and hard, my notes need to be crystal clear and organized, not strewn about with scrappy chats. With AI, we are swimming in lakes of words already, and a canvas makes it feel like a sea where I can't tell friend from foe.
There might be a feature that rescues notetaking. The notes are rooted in the filesystem, so you could just open them in Obsidian and edit from there (file-over-app philosophy!). Then, it would be ephemeral chatting and browsing on the canvas and durable note-taking in Obsidian. I haven't had the chance to try this though.
Maybe the bigger problem is that AI has overloaded me with information, and I'm chasing answers to get things done rather than exploring like a student or researcher. So for now, I use Thinking Canvas only rarely for things like fleshing out project ideas.
I have an aspiration to create something really useful that also looks like a toy. This project looks like a toy. But it is only moderately useful.
An interesting strategy for tool makers to just create a frontend on top of an existing agent. Then, users bring their eg Claude subscriptions and perhaps just pay a one-time cost for the frontend. Of course, the labs can shut this down at any time (and I believe they did for OpenClaw).
The design here was influenced by Factorio, which I played for like two days in January. Also by an interactive math playground called Polypad. And, quite strongly, by the Apple Notes icon. And by the greatest of all canvases, Figma. And by the multicolored Post-its on my desk.
The project is open source on GitHub.