Andy Matuschak
Writer and researcher on tools for thought, and the source of the term evergreen notes. His notes live at notes.andymatuschak.org as a public web of interlinked pages rather than a blog. atomic-note-completeness takes its definition from him, and wet-not-dry is this vault’s neighbouring rule about what a page must survive on its own.
The claim this vault uses is the one in matuschak-evergreen-notes-atomic: a note should be about one thing and should capture the entirety of that thing. Scope, not size. He also states the two failure directions, bloat that muddies links and fragmentation that thins them, and refuses to give a word count, saying there is no clear litmus test.
Per stafforini-two-years-evergreen-notes, Matuschak and the Zettelkasten tradition both treat surprise as the point of a note system, and Stafforini reads that as designed for original research rather than for learning a domain.
Sources
- matuschak-evergreen-notes-atomic, his own note, read 2026-10-05.
- stafforini-two-years-evergreen-notes, which quotes him twice.
- Nothing here about his employment, projects outside note-taking, or biography. Not read, so not filed.