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We are rebuilding Monica

monicahq.com

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#31

I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.

I enjoy using it! I don't tend to it as often as I could, and there are some ways in which the fields available on profiles/marking touch points don't exactly match my preferred mental model.

But this is one of those instances where I appreciate opinionated software reminding me to invest in what matters in relationships.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#32

I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development. For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs. If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all…

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Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#34
what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy?

Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#35

It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.

I Agree. LLMs chat assistant UI is more usable for this case. “My buddy Chris from fremont just got a promotion. Remember his new title and today’s date” is way easier than tapping a search query, filling forms, tabs and submit buttons.

For me it’s Notes.app, and I appreciate the notes being available offline and syncing across devices. Full text index is great.

I guess I’m lacking calendar invites, but I’ve been able to copy contents into AI to have it generate calendars for me.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#37

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about." That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together. I may start using it, even if that's a h…

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#39

I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.” I’ve become so cynical this year.

What’s cynical about this? Everybody is modernizing their codebases for agentic development.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#40
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well:

> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.

My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model.

If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings.

I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling feature of Monica, but I would like a tool that does things plaintext can't like remind me to reach out to someone I haven't spoken to in a while or remind me to follow up with someone (e.g., they're interviewing for the next few weeks so check in next month to see how that's going).

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