Tinderbox Meetup 23AUG26: AI, PKM & Tinderbox Workflows
| Level | Intermediate |
| Published Date | 8/31/26 |
| Type | Meetup |
| Tags | Artificial Intelligence, Human Agency, Knowledge Curation, Personal Knowledge Management, Tinderbox, 5CKM, 5Cs of Knowledge Management, Eastgate, Identity Praxis, Inc., Mark Bernstein, Michael Becker, Tinderbox |
| Video Length | 01:23:59 |
| Video URL | https://youtu.be/oFJUfK-01h0 |
| Chat File | TBX Meetup 23AUG26_Chat.txt (5.3 KB) |
| TBX Version | 11.5 |
| Instructor | Michael Becker |
This meetup explored how AI is beginning to intersect with Tinderbox and personal knowledge management. The group discussed connecting Claude with Tinderbox, including the opportunities for AI-assisted creation and automation as well as concerns around permissions, privacy, security, and maintaining human control. The conversation broadened into the challenge of organizing large personal knowledge collections, including workflows involving Obsidian and DEVONthink. A central idea was the “collection fallacy”: simply accumulating notes, files, and information does not create knowledge; value comes from deliberate selection, curation, understanding, and use.
The session then demonstrated a practical Tinderbox + AI workflow for managing a university course. Tinderbox was used as the structured thinking and publishing environment for lectures, assignments, dates, grading, and syllabus generation, while Claude helped standardize, review, revise, and generate assignment materials. The demonstration showed how 25 assignments were reviewed and updated in roughly seven hours, including finding longstanding inconsistencies. Importantly, the discussion emphasized human agency and critical thinking: AI can accelerate and augment the work, but the human remains responsible for evaluating and approving its output.
Key learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants should be able to:
- Explain how AI tools can augment Tinderbox workflows, including creating, revising, organizing, and exporting structured content.
- Design a layered PKM workflow in which tools such as Obsidian, DEVONthink, Tinderbox, and AI serve different roles rather than trying to make one application do everything.
- Recognize and avoid the collection fallacy by emphasizing intentional curation, understanding, and use rather than simply accumulating information.
- Apply AI while preservin