Technology amplifies intent.

Every tool amplifies someone's intent. The only honest questions to ask of a technology are whose intent it amplifies, and what it costs the person using it. This is what we build, and why.

01Intent

A tool is never neutral. A feed is built to be scrolled, a notification to be opened, a recommendation to be followed. None of that is an accident; each is an intent, made of code, pointed at a person. That is why there is no exit button on Instagram.

The same is true in the other direction. A notebook amplifies the intent to remember. A script amplifies the intent to do a dull thing once and never again. The feature is never the point. The point is whose intent gets louder, and for whom.

So before we build anything, we ask the first-principles question: is this really necessary, and who is it for? If the honest answer is that it serves the builder at the user's expense, we do not build it.

Technology amplifies a person's intent. So what matters is not the feature itself, but which intent it amplifies and for whom.

Me.md, first principles

02Attention

Attention and the capacity to think are finite, and they are being taken. Eleven hours a day of attention is not free; when the product is free, someone is paying with the user's mind. We are being robbed of a great deal, and the theft is designed to feel like entertainment.

Feeds hijack the circuit that makes real focus feel good. They produce immersion without achievement: four in the morning, an algorithm, and nothing to show for it. Everyone knows the feeling. We built a lab around refusing it.

A crude blocklist is not the answer. The internet is designed to manipulate us, so we need tools designed for us: tools that understand what a person is trying to do and quietly keep the rest at a distance. Simply detaching the nodes you never needed to be close to lets you think the thoughts you meant to think.

Attention and the capacity to think must not be taken for someone else's purpose. Good technology helps a person choose where their own cognitive resources go.

Me.md, first principles

03Knowledge that stays yours

A second brain is not an archive of everything you read. It collects the resonance in your own mind: the sentence that rang when you read it, the decision you made and why, the thing you learned the hard way. Kept in plain Markdown, on your own disk, in a Git repository that is the canonical copy.

Structure is what makes it durable. Notes sorted by purpose rather than topic, so every note has one home. One self-contained idea per permanent note, linked to the next. Maps that hold the ideas in relation. A chain of daily, weekly, and yearly notes that turns ordinary days into context a future self can read.

Knowledge management is what lets you keep doing the work you want to do. Notion touches the world; Obsidian stays attached to you. We build for the second kind.

Knowledge management lets you keep doing what you want to do.

Permanent note

04Agents with an owner

An agent is not a model. It is a model plus an identity, a code of conduct, a set of tools, and a person who can inspect what it did. We build the parts around the model, and we keep them vendor-neutral so that switching runtimes never means rewriting how you work.

In the age of agents, the theft of cognitive resources returns with a new face. "Just do it for me" feels like relief and quietly costs a person their agency. To use a good tool well, the user needs energy left over, and nobody makes good decisions twenty-four hours a day. A tool that drains the person it serves has already failed.

So every agent here has an owner, explicit boundaries, and reversible changes. It reads the same conventions a person reads and files notes where a person would. It returns evidence, not status: a task is complete when the result can be inspected, not when it is announced. Every session leaves a receipt.

To use a good tool well, the user has to have energy left too.

Startup application, 2026

05Why Ataraxia

Ataraxia is the old word for an untroubled mind, and the name of the vault this lab grew out of. The image behind it is an ivory tower borrowed from a story about mages: magic that cannot be misused by the world, that will not bend to a ruler's beliefs, pursued purely for its own height.

Ivory is white and clean, and it stains easily. To be like ivory is to be delicate and vulnerable, and to remain unstained anyway. That is not retreat from the world. It is a refusal to let the world decide where your thinking goes.

XIA is the operational side of that ideal: the vault conventions, the plugins, the agent skills, the small systems that make an untroubled mind workable day after day. We make them for ourselves first, and we share the ones that hold.

I want to hold an ideal and move toward it quietly, unstained. My life's ideal is here.

Why is my Obsidian vault named Ataraxia

---

Beomsu Koh, founder · Ataraxia, Korea