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.
Install Wispal from the Chrome Web Store ↗
I iterated through three versions this week. I submitted a new version an hour ago, and next week I will focus on improving Note.