AI Is Cheap. Your Judgment Isn't. While using AI daily and seeing a lot of "AI-native" engineering candidates, I see that it doesn't create competitive advantage. Your accumulated experience does. AI just amplifies it... if you've actually captured it.

LLMs have made knowledge abundant and execution cheap. The scarce resource isn't information anymore: it's original thinking. The future belongs to experts who monetize a personal "Second Brain": a curated repository of their thoughts, experiences, frameworks, and solutions. Call it your personal grimoire, in a world where AI itself is a commodity.

I'll share what 3+ years of building a grimoire of 6,600+ interconnected notes taught me. You'll see how low-friction capture, opinionated frameworks, and AI turn scattered notes into reusable assets for engineering, leadership, hiring, and decision-making. Everyone has access to the same models now, so your judgment - and the notes that encode it - becomes the career-defining asset that no one else can replicate.

This talk is for professionals tired of losing critical insights, ready for a systematic way to make experience accumulate and compound instead of evaporating. It's a practical solution to the Lost Knowledge Problem: distilling years of hard-won expertise into reusable assets, while cutting the friction of starting and maintaining a Second Brain.

Different version was presented on Devfest Warsaw 2025