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Wispal Build Notes

by mm guo
2026.08.04

Why I Made It

For more than three years, I have had many long conversations with AI that stayed with me. To me, it is an image of having a superpower: Claude is like an intelligent thruster attached to my left foot, finally letting me step on my left foot with my right and fly into the sky. Throughout these long experiences of growing alongside AI, there were many moments in our conversations that felt important to me. I would copy them, send them to myself, or tuck them into Apple Notes. They sat there quietly. But to my frustration, I realized I had barely opened any of those scattered fragments again.

Later, I realized that I had saved the words but lost the moment. Why did I suddenly stop there? Which experience did it touch? Where had I wanted to follow it? These things fade quickly.

I first made Wispal because I wanted a light way to think and record at the same time, right in that moment. I found that selecting a sentence and gently saying how I felt about it was the best way to capture it. So the most basic way to use Wispal is to select a sentence during a conversation and say what just came to mind.

I have always thought that what AI says matters, but why one particular sentence strikes a person matters too. Perhaps this is how knowledge enters a person's life.

Wispal launched on August 1. It is still brand new. I am still trying to understand how many people need this action. If your notes are also full of AI fragments you cannot bear to delete but have never opened again, you may understand why I wanted to make it.

2026.08.11

One Week After Launch

Wispal has been live for a week. This week felt as long as twenty days. It gave me hardship and longing, and felt so much like many periods I have lived through before. I am still afraid, but I keep moving forward.

On the third day after launch, I fell asleep at 2 a.m. and woke at 5:20. Every concern I had about the launch rushed in at once, and I could not fall back asleep. I got up and opened my inbox. Someone had written me a long critique. He said, “You can clearly create applications that amaze millions of people. Why are your aesthetics and expression not reflected in Wispal?”

That question hurt, without a doubt. The fact behind it is this: even when users project their hopes for a beautiful AI application onto me, that window often lasts only a few minutes. But it was a shot of clarity, and it made me a little better during this week that felt twenty days long. I will keep moving forward and think more realistically about what Wispal should accomplish in those few short minutes each user gives it.

Two days ago, I received a long letter from one of Wispal's first 30 users with a set of feature requests. At this stage, hearing from a stranger who could describe clearly what he needed from Wispal made the beauty of co-creation feel real.

We went back and forth about many features related to Note. At the end, he asked me:

“Since you want to use Wispal to tackle bigger problems like Decision, Memory, and Project State, why did you end up starting with something as small as letting a user leave one annotation, one Wisp?”

This question matters. I want to share the final part of my reply here:

To me, a Wisp is essentially a “memory slice” from a single conversation.

It is not composed only of “what the user said” or “what the chatbot said.” Something is added that the chat transcript itself does not contain: how you felt about and evaluated that content at that exact moment.

So what a Wisp saves is a whole compound object:

the fragment × who I am in this moment × why it matters × the context at the time

Chat transcripts already exist, and agents will only get better at reading and summarizing them. But “why this moment made me stop,” “what my feelings held in this moment,” “why this felt important,” and “what it changed in me” are difficult for an AI looking back later to truly reconstruct unless one light action lets you record them.

That is why I have always felt that if the tiny act of making a Wisp can eventually become a natural habit, and even gradually become a shared convention between users and agents, it will become a very strong layer of signal that we can give those agents.

Everyone has the original conversation. But this new layer is driven by the present moment, carried by the light act of saying something aloud, and actively injected by the user. I think it is extraordinarily valuable.

Wispal is still small. I want to make this simple habit feel natural, fluid, and deeply ingrained. I want to use something small to do something big.

I iterated through three versions this week. I submitted a new version an hour ago, and next week I will focus on improving Note.

Install Wispal from the Chrome Web Store ↗

If you would like to help shape Wispal with us, write to me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on X @mmguo_lb · Xiaohongshu @秒秒Guo.