As a SWE at Amazon, I constantly faced two frustrations:
1. Getting interrupted on Slack all day with questions I'd already answered
2. Waiting hours (or days) for responses when I needed information from teammates
When you compare this to the UX of an AI chatbot, humans start to look pretty inconvenient! It’s a bit of a wild take, but it’s really been reflected in my conversations with dozens of engineers, and especially juniors: people would rather spend 20 minutes wrestling with an unreliable AI than risk looking ignorant or wasting their coworkers’ time. One of my early users actually tried the product and told me she’s a bit worried her coworkers would prefer talking to her AI extension over talking to her!
Here’s how it works: It’s a desktop app (mac only right now) that captures screenshots every 5 seconds while you work. It uses a bespoke, ultra-long context vision model (OCR isn’t enough, and generic models are far too expensive!) to understand what you're doing and automatically builds a searchable, hyperlinked knowledge base (wiki) of everything you work on - code you write, bugs you fix, decisions you make, or anything else you do on a computer that could be useful to you or your team’s productivity in the future.
Even if you just turn on Knowledgework for ~30 mins while working on a personal project, I think you’ll find what it produces to be really interesting — something I’ve learned is that we tend to underestimate the extent of the valuable information we produce every day that is just ephemeral and forgotten. There’s also some really great opportunities surrounding quantified self and reflection — just ask it how you could have been more productive yesterday or how you could come across better in your meetings.
The real value comes when your teammates can query your "Extension" - an AI agent that has access to all (only what you choose to share) of your captured work context. Imagine your coworker is on vacation, but you can still ask their Extension: "I'm trying to deploy a new Celery worker. It's gossiping but not receiving tasks. Have you seen this before?"
We’ve spent a great deal of effort on optimizing for privacy as a priority; not just in terms of encryption and data security, but in terms of modulating what your Extension will divulge in a relationship appropriate way, and how you can configure this. By default, nothing is shared. In a team setting, you can choose to share your Extension with particular individuals. You can, in a fine-grained manner, grant and revoke access to portions of your time, or if you are on a tight-knit team, you can just leave it to AI to decide what makes sense to be accessed. This is the area we’re most excited to get feedback on, so we’re really aiming this launch at small, tight knit teams who care about speed and productivity at all costs who use Macs, Slack, Notion, and are all on Claude Code Max plans.
We’re also working on SOC II type 2 compliance and can do on-prem, although on-prem will be quite expensive. If you’re curious about on-prem or additional certifications, I’d love to chat - griffin@knowledgework.ai.
Check it out here: https://knowledgework.ai/
We’ve opened it up today for anyone to install and use for free. If you’re seeing this after Thursday 8/28, we’ll likely have put back the code wall — but we’d be happy to give codes to anyone who reaches out to griffin@knowledgework.ai
