Prometheus
He stole fire from the gods. This one steals your reading list.
Prometheus reads what you never get to. The articles, the videos, the transcripts, the competitor pages and the trade press stacking up in your bookmarks — and it comes back with the few things that genuinely touch your business, already connected to what you know and pointed at the decision they affect.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to people, on the reasonable grounds that they were going to need it. The myth, abridged
01 It learns you first
It reads your business before it reads anything else.
Before it goes looking, it learns what you actually do: the services you sell, the customers you want more of, the questions you get asked on every call, the decisions you are weighing this quarter, and the handful of subjects you have said you want to stay current on.
That is what makes the difference between research and noise. An article is not interesting in the abstract. It is interesting because it touches an offer you sell, answers a question a customer keeps asking, or changes a decision you have not made yet. Everything it reads gets measured against your business, not against what is trending.
And nothing arrives in isolation. Your second brain is already a web of connected notes — clients, offers, past projects, things you have written down. A new finding comes back attached to the notes it relates to, so it lands next to the work it affects instead of on a pile you will never sort.
02 The keeper
Fire was only worth stealing because he handed it over.
In the story, Prometheus takes fire from the gods and gives it to people. Not so they can look at it — so they can cook with it, forge with it, and get through the winter. The whole point of the myth is the handing over.
That is the job here. Reading is the easy part. The work is coming back with something you can use, attached to the thing it is useful for, at the moment it matters rather than three months later.
He carries a torch and an open book, and nothing else. He brings the fire to you. He does not publish it, does not send it to anyone, and does not put your name to it. What to do with it stays your call — which is the part of the arrangement that keeps you out of trouble.
03 What it actually does
Five things it does, every single time.
The same five steps run on every piece of material it picks up, whether that is a forty-page report or a two-minute clip somebody sent you.
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01
Reads
Articles, videos, transcripts, PDFs, industry newsletters, competitor pages, grant and tool announcements, and whatever you point it at. The material you bookmarked and never opened is exactly the material it is for.
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02
Separates fact from interpretation
A written rule, not a tendency. What the source actually says is recorded separately from what it might mean for you. When the two get blended, you end up quoting somebody’s speculation back to a customer as though it were established.
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03
Checks it against what you already hold
Before anything is filed, it looks at the knowledge already in your second brain. Duplicates get flagged rather than stacked. A system that files everything twice is worse than one that files nothing, because now you have to work out which copy is current.
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04
Connects it to something you care about
A finding with no destination is trivia. Each one gets attached to a goal, an offer, an open question or a piece of the business it actually bears on — and if it does not bear on anything, that is a reason not to keep it.
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05
Keeps its sources
Every summary keeps the link and the origin. Six months on, when a claim matters enough to check, you can go back to where it came from instead of trusting a paraphrase of a paraphrase.
04 Where the fire goes
Out of the library, across two gates, into the work.
Reading is the easy half. The hard half is that something read has to survive the trip into work you actually send — without picking up a claim you cannot stand behind on the way.
Gate one
Is it true?
A human confirms the finding is accurate and the source supports it. Nothing that fails here goes any further, however interesting it is.
Gate two
Are we allowed to say it?
Separately, a human decides whether it can be used publicly — whose information it is, what was shared in confidence, what needs permission first.
Keeping those two questions apart is the whole design. Something can be entirely true and still not yours to publish. Truth is not permission, and a system that treats them as one question will eventually embarrass you with a fact. For the longer version of this thinking, see the field guide in the Learning Log.
05 The unglamorous truth
It is a folder of markdown wearing a very good costume.
The renders on this page are how it feels to have one. This is what it is: instruction files, a routing config, and a set of written rules about what it may and may not conclude. Same as everything else we build, and deliberately so — you can read it, change it, and take it with you.
It does not
- Publish anything
- Email anyone
- Change a CRM record
- Act on what it finds
It will not
- Invent a source
- State a guess as a finding
- Drop the origin link
- Fill the vault with noise
It escalates
- Anything legal or regulatory
- Anything about a named person
- Conflicting sources
- Claims it cannot verify
You keep
- The instruction files
- The routing rules
- Everything it has filed
- The right to switch models
06 Next step
Bring the tabs you never closed.
Prometheus sits on top of an AI Business Brain — it needs somewhere to file things and something to connect them to. If that already exists, this is a fast addition. If it does not, that is the conversation to have first, and the audit is where it starts.