Cortex
Cortex is RS42’s public knowledge garden: short, connected notes on what we’ve learned building AI systems that do real work on their own. Everything here comes from years of hands-on building, generalized so anyone can use it — written in plain language, for people inside and outside the industry.
This is not a blog with a newest-first feed. It’s a knowledge graph: each note carries one idea, and the links between notes carry the relationships. Read it the way you’d explore a map — follow whatever link pulls at you, or walk the path below in order. The graph view on each page shows you where you are.
Start here
From a Tool You Use to a System That Works With You — the whole story in one note: how AI stops being something you operate and becomes something you work with.
The path
Each unit builds on the one before it.
- Memory & Knowledge Graphs — AI forgets everything by default. Giving it a durable, linked memory changes what it can be.
- Connections — a mind is only as useful as what it can reach. How AI gets plugged into your tools, your services, and your knowledge.
- Skills & Personas — models know a lot; they don’t know your way. Teaching AI how to do things, and shaping it into specialists.
- Autonomy — work that starts itself, runs while you sleep, and can be trusted to report honestly.
- 20 Business — what all of this makes possible: one person, real business, AI running the routine while you keep the judgment.
Also here
- Resources — the public sources and tools we reference.
The garden grows. Notes get added, revised, and connected over time — that’s the point.