How Does CODE Work in Mikipage?

Author: Daniel Zhou · Date: September 23, 2026

If you use Tiago Forte's CODE approach, you already know that a Second Brain is not just a place to store information. Its purpose is to move ideas through four stages:

Capture what resonates.
Organize it for action.
Distill it to its useful essence.
Express it in work you share with other people.

Mikipage follows the same movement, but draws the line between human and machine in a particular place. You decide what is worth capturing, because no AI can decide what matters to you. AI then does the clerical work of finding relationships, maintaining structure, and turning many small notes into something coherent. You return at the end to decide what to say, who to involve, and what to publish.

The mapping looks like this:

CODE	Mikipage
Capture	Text-first notes, attachments, voice-to-text, Ask, and MCP
Organize	Miki pages, Similar notes, search, and tags
Distill	Synthesized pages, Graph view, and Suggest pages
Express	Private groups, shared pages, and public publishing

The stages still matter. What changes is how much filing they require from you.

Capture: write what only you can notice

Capture begins with a judgment: this is worth keeping. It may be an idea that arrived in the shower, a sentence from a conversation, a decision from a meeting, or something you learned the hard way. Mikipage cannot make that judgment for you, and it should not try. Its job is to make the next step small enough that you actually take it.

Open Write, put the thought into a note, and move on. Notes can be fragments, bullets, questions, journal entries, or complete prose. You do not need to choose a folder, build a hierarchy, or predict the future project that might use the thought.

Mikipage is deliberately text-first. A note contains Markdown text and is limited to 32,768 characters, roughly 5,000 words. That is not an arbitrary missing feature. Plain text is portable, searchable, and the material AI understands best. The size limit also means AI can work with the complete note instead of silently losing the end, and that a page can synthesize several notes without every refresh becoming unnecessarily expensive.

In practice, focused notes also make a better Second Brain. A note about one observation can contribute to a project timeline, a topic overview, and a collection of lessons learned at the same time. A 40-page catch-all document is harder for both a person and an AI to reuse.

Capturing things that are not text

Some things cannot sensibly become Markdown: a photo, a screenshot, a scanned form, a PDF, or an Excel workbook. Attach the file to a note and write a few words about what it is and why it matters.

For example:

2026 home insurance policy. Premium is $2,400 per year, renewal is in March, and flood coverage is included.

Attach the policy PDF underneath that description. The file stays with the note and is there when you find it later. Mikipage's AI does not read inside attachments, so the description is the part it can search, associate with pages, and synthesize. An empty note with a PDF attached is storage; a short description beside the PDF turns it into knowledge.

Pictures and screenshots work the same way: take the picture, attach it, and add the context your future self will need. The context may be only a sentence. That sentence is often more valuable than any automatic image caption because it records why you kept the image.

Capturing something longer than one note

If a document is longer than 32K characters, attach the original and summarize it in the note, or split the useful material into several focused notes. You can link those notes to one another with note references, but you do not need to reconstruct the original document as a folder tree. A Miki page can gather the pieces again and present them as one coherent view.

This is easier if you capture thoughts as they appear instead of waiting to assemble one perfect master note. Write the meeting decision now, the follow-up thought tomorrow, and the lesson a month later. Large notes are rare when each idea gets captured at the moment it becomes useful.

Capturing by voice and from AI conversations

Mikipage does not need its own recording format to accept spoken thoughts. Use the voice dictation built into your phone or laptop and speak directly into a note. What lands in Mikipage is text, ready for search and synthesis, rather than an audio file you still have to replay someday.

AI conversations deserve capture too. A useful hour with ChatGPT, Claude, or another assistant should not disappear into a provider-specific chat history.

If your assistant supports MCP, connect it to Mikipage and say, “Save this to Mikipage.” It can turn the useful result into a note without leaving the conversation.
In Mikipage's Ask chat, ask the assistant to save a concise summary as a note, or use Save chat to note to preserve the entire visible conversation.

That gives important AI conversations from different providers one durable home, beside the thoughts you wrote yourself.

Two more capture paths are on the roadmap: a browser extension for capturing a web page, and native Android and iPhone apps. Today, the web app works on a phone, and native voice-to-text is the simplest way to capture on the move. The product is not trying to become a save-everything inbox in the meantime. The valuable part is still the text you chose to keep and the reason you kept it.

Organize: put everything in one place first

The traditional organizing question is “Where does this go?” Mikipage's answer is: into your notes.

That single pile is intentional. At capture time, you usually know what an idea means now, but not every way it will matter later. Filing it under one subject forces an early choice. Copying it into several folders creates several versions to maintain. Leaving it unfiled feels wrong only because older tools could not recover structure afterward.

Mikipage organizes after capture, when there is enough context to do it well.

A Miki page is a smart folder around a subject and a readable page about that subject at the same time. Give it a title and instructions such as:

Keep a practical account of what I am learning about public speaking. Group the advice by theme, call out contradictions, and end with techniques to try next.

When you refresh the page, AI finds the notes that fit those instructions, associates them with the page, and synthesizes the result. Open the page's Notes view and you can see the collection underneath it. Open Page and you see the organized account. One note can belong to several Miki pages, so you get several useful structures without moving or copying the source.

You also have lighter ways to organize without creating a page:

Similar notes begins with one note and finds others related by meaning. It is useful when you remember one part of a trail but not the rest.
Search retrieves notes by meaning, even when you do not remember your original wording.
Tags give you an exact, human-chosen filter when one is useful. They are optional, not a filing tax on every capture.

You can still make explicit links between notes when the relationship itself matters. The difference is that you are adding a meaningful connection, not doing routine clerical work just to keep the system usable.

Distill: let pages do the repeated compression

Distillation is where most note systems stall. Highlighting a book once is easy; returning to hundreds of highlights and turning them into a clear point of view is work. The raw material accumulates faster than anyone can keep compressing it.

Miki pages make that repeated distillation their main job. A page can turn scattered notes into a summary, timeline, comparison, FAQ, set of open questions, or another shape you describe in its instructions. Its claims cite the notes they came from, so the distilled version never severs the path back to your own words.

The result is also alive. Add another note, then refresh the page, and the new material can be matched and folded into the existing account. Your notes stay untouched; the page is the AI-maintained layer that changes as your understanding changes.

Two features help when you do not yet know what the distilled view should be:

Graph view shows how a page's notes connect through references, tags, people and other named things, and related pages. It lets you inspect the structure behind the prose and notice clusters or bridges that a linear page can hide.
Suggest pages analyzes your recent notes, summarizes their main topics and themes, and proposes Miki pages worth creating. It is useful when a subject has emerged in your writing before you have given it a name.

Distillation is not the same as surrendering judgment. You decide what each page is for, you can inspect its source notes, and you can pin a note when it must be included. AI does the rereading and rewriting; you remain the editor of the brief.

Express: turn private notes into shared understanding

Expression is where knowledge leaves your private system and becomes useful to someone else. Mikipage supports two different audiences: people you know and the open web.

Express with a group

Create a group for a family, circle of friends, study group, club, or project. Share only the notes you want to contribute. The note remains yours: other members can read and comment on it, but they cannot edit your words. There is no shared master document for everyone to overwrite and no copy that drifts away from your original.

The group's Miki pages can synthesize across the notes that all members have shared. That changes expression from “send everyone my document” into “build a common view from what each person knows.” A family travel page can combine one person's itinerary, another person's restaurant ideas, and a third person's accessibility needs. A study group's page can reconcile several sets of reading notes. Every contributor keeps authorship of their source material while the group gets a living, shared account.

Groups can stay private, and they can also be useful when you are the only member. A solo group gives a bounded project its own sharing context now and leaves room to invite someone later.

Express to the web

Make a group public and its notes and Miki pages become readable on the web without an account. Give the group and its content friendly aliases, and it can serve as a public wiki, a set of documentation, or a blog like this one.

Publishing uses the same material you already captured and organized. You do not export a copy into a separate website and remember to update it. New contributions can feed the same public pages, and readers can follow citations back to the public source notes. The private-to-public boundary remains explicit: only content you place in the public group is published.

This also makes expression collaborative without requiring everyone to become a wiki editor. People contribute notes in their own words. AI maintains the shared page. The group decides what belongs in public.

A CODE workflow without the filing

In daily use, the loop can be very small:

Capture the thought as a focused text note. Attach the original file when there is one and describe why it matters.
Organize later. Let search, Similar notes, and Miki pages recover the structure instead of choosing a folder while the thought is fresh.
Distill by refreshing focused pages. Use Suggest pages and Graph view when you want to discover the structure you did not already know was there.
Express by sharing selected notes into a group, letting a group page synthesize several people's knowledge, or publishing the group to the web.

CODE remains the movement from experience to useful output. Mikipage changes the labor inside that movement.

You capture because meaning is personal. You express because audience and intent are personal too. Between those moments, AI can be the patient clerk: reading the pile, finding the relationships, and keeping the distilled pages current.

Your job is to notice what matters and put it into words. The filing cabinet can finally take care of itself.