Spring. Exploring.
Stem
Document your rabbit holes and discover new ones.
Leave a trail.
The problem
Rabbit holes leave no trail. The links, notes and half-thoughts of a week of curiosity end up in twelve tabs and a screenshot.
The approach
Stems: document a rabbit hole as you go, from the browser, the phone or the web, and follow the trails other people left when their curiosity went the same way.
What we learned
It is about ninety percent built and it stalled on conviction, not bandwidth. The open question is whether people want to publish their curiosity, and that is a question to ask before finishing.
Next
Gauge interest before writing more code.
stem.md- Status
- Exploring; most of it is built
- Runs on
- Web, iPhone, a Chrome extension
- Since
- March 2026
- Built with
- A web app and API, an iOS app and a browser extension, each its own repository
- Signature
- Stems, artifacts, nodes, branches: the vocabulary is the design
The print
Mammoth Cave, Kentucky
The longest known cave system in the world. Nobody has reached the end of it.
The Illustrated London News, 1859. Two of three inks: umber, yellow. The aqua waits until it ships. Source. Public domain.
