An AI that fixes your notes — and refuses to add a single fact

The safest way to organize notes with AI is to let it change how a note is written and never what it says. MindMax quick notes work that way: every typo, misheard word and broken sentence is corrected, the thought is filed under the right heading, and nothing you did not say is added — no facts, no conclusions, no firmer wording than yours.

That sounds like a small distinction. It is the whole difference between a note you can trust next month and a note you have to re-check.

Why a rewrite is the wrong default

An AI asked to "clean up" a note will happily do more than clean. "Maybe the cover is too dark?" becomes "The cover is too dark." Three fragments about a supplier become a tidy paragraph with a recommendation at the end that nobody made. Each change reads well. Together they turn your record of what happened into the model's guess about what probably happened.

The damage shows up later. A note is only useful if you can act on it without re-checking, and you cannot tell, a month on, which sentences were yours. So we drew the line where a good secretary draws it: take the words down properly, put them in the right file, and keep your opinions out of it.

What it fixes, every time

The first half of the job is the scribe's. Every quick note gets the same treatment, however short:

• Wording. Typos, a stray letter, the word speech recognition misheard, grammar and word order are corrected — in a one-line note too. An earlier version left short notes alone; the typos that survived were the reason to stop.
• Form. Filler and false starts go; when you correct yourself mid-sentence, only the corrected version stays; the point comes first; something you have to do becomes a task. A short line does not get headings or bullets it does not need.
• Place. The thought goes where you would have put it: under its heading, after the item it continues, in the list if that section is a list.

If you want a line kept exactly as you typed it, say so, and only the punctuation is touched.

What it will not do

The second rule is the one that makes the first safe. Every point, name, number and hedge you gave stays. A question stays a question — it is not answered for you. "Maybe" does not become "definitely". Nothing is added: no examples you did not give, no summary at the end, no next step you did not decide.

That includes requests for new writing that arrive in the middle of a quick note. "Turn the above into an email to the client" is real work, and it is never slipped into the note as if you had written it. It is kept as a task, with an offer to run it — or, if you meant it as an instruction from the start, you press ⌘Enter instead of Enter and it is done as its own change, previewed word by word. Edits to what is already there — rename this heading, merge those two items, move that line — are carried out directly, because they rearrange your words rather than inventing new ones.

When it is not sure, it says so

Correcting spelling means guessing, and guesses about names are the ones that go wrong. So the corrections it is unsure of are listed — "lina → Lena" — beside the change, before you accept it. Most of the time the list is empty. When it is not, it is usually the one word that would have been embarrassing in an email.

And nothing is written until you accept. A quick note arrives as a marked change on the note: the corrected text, where it is going, and an Accept and a Reject. Parts of the note it is not filing into are not touched at all.

Tidying the whole note, only when you ask

A week of quick notes piles up in the order things occurred to you. A Tidy whole note button reorganises the lot: it fixes typos across the note, brings related points together, keeps a point you wrote twice once, and adds short labels when the note covers several topics. Dated entries keep their order. The same rule holds — the shape changes, the content does not — and every change is a revision you can reject.

It runs only when you press it. A note that reorganised itself every time you added a line would never look the way you left it, and a note you cannot find your way around is worse than a messy one.

What it costs

The rule has a price, and it is better to know it up front.

• The note stays your note. If you jot fragments, you get corrected, filed fragments — not prose. A tool that writes for you will produce nicer-looking pages; they will just be less yours.
• Some fixes need your eye. Names and in-house jargon are where corrections go wrong. The uncertainty list catches most of it; it cannot catch a confident mistake on a name it has never seen.
• New writing is a separate step. Turning a log into an update is one key away, but it is a step you take on purpose, and its draft deserves a read before it goes out.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming it never gets a word wrong — it does, which is why changes wait for you. We are not claiming it is a task manager, a calendar or a meeting recorder: "remind me" becomes a to-do in the note, not an alert. And we are not claiming fixing is neutral: correcting a word is a judgement. The promise is narrower and checkable — it does not add what you did not say, and it shows you every change it makes.

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How it works in the app: AI quick notes, with the keys and the Tidy whole note button in voice and quick notes, step by step. A week of it in practice: keep a project log that writes your weekly update.