For researchers & creators

Your AI knows your draft, your sources, your voice.

Every new chat: three paragraphs about the piece, the angle, the voice you're writing in, the two interviews that mattered. By the time the AI is useful, you've burned the energy you meant for the draft. Mara writes you a context folder where context.md carries voice and thesis, projects/brief.md carries the piece in motion, and inbox.md collects voice memos and PDFs in one place your AI can actually read.

What your context looks like

context.mdYour voice, your beat, your sources, the piece you're writing right now. Paste it into any chat.
README.mdHow your context works. Notes on importing voice memos. ~2KB.
inbox.mdQuotes, memo timestamps, PDFs, links. Triaged Friday.
projects/decide-the-thesis-angle/brief.mdThree candidate angles. The context your AI needs to help you choose by Friday.
weekly-review.mdPulls inbox forward. Updates context.md when the angle shifts so AI drafts don't lag.
CLAUDE.mdDoubles as Cursor rules and ChatGPT custom instructions. Tell your tool which file to read first.

How it survives week two

  • Capture without retrieval is a graveyard. The starter ships with search-recipes.md on day one — three queries you'll run, written before you forget what you need.
  • One project, one deadline. Three half-drafts is the disease. Mara names the one project you owe yourself this week and pins it to Friday.
  • Voice memos become text on capture. The README tells you the one transcription move that actually sticks (paste, don't think).

Using it

Obsidian is the default — your vault opens the folder directly. If you live in voice memos on iPhone, the README gives you the Shortcut that dumps a transcript into inbox.md with a timestamp. PDFs go in a /refs subfolder; you'll thank yourself when search-recipes pulls them back up.

Point Claude Code or Cursor at the folder when it's time to draft. "Pull every quote from inbox that's about pricing" is a one-line prompt against plain markdown. No plugin, no API.