You know, the trouble is, you're absolutely right. I _could_ have just said "I'm working on a note-taking app", but nothing about that seems particularly weird or hard.

To address the poetic waxing more directly, it's important to remember that we still don't have very good language to talk about the "primitives of knowledge work", which is why I phrased my statement the way I did. We know it almost certainly doesn't involve the concept of "notes" (at least in the way we think about right now) and calling them simply "ideas" is altogether too vague.

As far as the #roamcult is concerned, we are overwhelmingly in agreement :)

Like most note-taking app developers, you don't seem to be concerned with the fundamental questions of what notes are and why we take them. In a certain sense everything we create physically or digitally can be considered a note.

Many write-only "scratchpad" notes are useful because they helped the mind focus and organize information. They can often be safely archived or discarded.