For a long time, a big part of my job was remembering things for other people.

Leading product and engineering teams, I'd hear something important on a customer call, explain it again in planning, turn it into tickets, and then explain the reasoning one more time when someone started building. We had good tools for each of those steps. What connected them was usually me.

We've poked fun at this in our marketing as the "Human API." It's a joke, but I was one for years. And when the human API is out, or moves on, everyone else is left reconstructing what happened.

Most of the value in a hard conversation is the reasoning: why you ruled out an approach, what the customer actually needed, which constraint changed the plan. That reasoning matters to whoever writes the spec tomorrow and to whoever revisits the decision six months from now. It should be available wherever that work happens. More and more, that isn't the tool where the conversation got captured.

"We had good tools for each of those steps. What connected them was usually me."

Karri Saarinen recently wrote about brand as an expression of what a company believes. His test is a useful one for founders: look at the decisions. What do you build, where do you spend extra effort, and what won't you compromise on? When I apply that to Earmark, one of the clearest answers is a folder of text files.

Our desktop app automatically saves meeting transcripts as Markdown files on your computer. It's on by default. You can change where they go or turn it off. Because they're plain text, you can read them yourself, keep them with your project docs, or give Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor access to the folder.

The belief behind that is simple: you should control your context, including when you want to use it somewhere other than Earmark.

"One of the clearest answers is a folder of text files."

Say an engineer is picking up a change the team discussed last week. Their coding agent reads the transcript and pulls out the constraints and the approaches the team already rejected before it proposes anything. The engineer still reviews the result, but they're starting from what was actually said instead of a one-line ticket.

Or a PM is getting ready for a customer follow-up in a tool they already use. The conversation is right there with everything else.

In both cases Earmark is doing useful work, and nobody is in Earmark.

The test gets more interesting when a belief costs you something. This one does. A lot of software keeps customers by making their data hard to move. It works. It also makes it hard to tell whether people stay because the product is good or because leaving is a hassle.

I'd rather know the difference. If people keep choosing Earmark, I want it to be because we were useful in their last meeting. Portability gives us a healthy obligation: keep earning the next one.

"Earmark is doing useful work, and nobody is in Earmark."

That commits us to a few things. We'll keep making context easier to take elsewhere, even when that means people spend less time in our app. The files need to be useful on their own, which means readable, easy to find, and no tour of our interface required. Saving has to stay automatic, because remembering to export every meeting is exactly the kind of chore we're trying to get rid of. And the files should keep working as the rest of your setup changes. Teams switch coding tools, reorganize their docs, and pick up agents that don't exist yet. The conversations behind their work should make it through all of that.

"The file on your laptop is yours. That isn't the same as saying nothing ever left your laptop."

I also want to be precise about one thing. Local files are about ownership, not about where processing happens. Earmark uses outside AI providers to process meetings, and our privacy page spells out what that involves, including how long providers may keep data. The file on your laptop is yours. That isn't the same as saying nothing ever left your laptop, and we're not going to blur the two.

There's a lot more we want Earmark to do. This is a commitment we can make today, in something you can open and check for yourself. If you use the desktop app, open the folder. If the files aren't useful to you, I want to hear about it.

Your team did the thinking. You should be able to take it with you.