I built a product called Grain. It was a slight detour from my usual writing but an experience that is seeding upcoming in-depth articles. Crafting it was addictingly painful — vibe coding into late nights of bug bashing and never ending refactoring multiple times. Read more to learn about Grain. I’ll write about vibe coding soon.
Grain is an AI that grows with you. Through conversations, it'll remember what you talk about, your preferences, your projects, and key moments in life. As I wrote in my previous essay, memories are essential for users to perceive AI not just as tools, but as agents. After writing that, I felt the urge to build—to make the idea real. The result is Grain. I will be writing more about the journey of building this soon, but for now, here’s more about Grain.
Relationships often matter because of the shared memories we build over time. Grain aims to become that kind of digital AI companion. It won't be perfect—it will hallucinate like most AIs—but it’ll try to know you. And whenever you want Grain to forget, you can easily delete specific memories or clear them all.
Because memories grow over time, switching from other AI tools can be hard. So, Grain lets you import conversations from other apps like ChatGPT to pick up seamlessly where you left off.
What Grain isn't (yet): It’s not built for deep knowledge work or complicated data analysis (like ChatGPT does), nor for extensive web research (like Perplexity does)—though it can do the usual web searches and help with productivity tasks. It also is a browser app for now.
What Grain is: It's for anyone who wants an AI companion that genuinely tries to remember conversations.
If you’re curious about a simple comparison, ChatGPT doesn’t recognize I chatted with it today. I've had the memory feature turned on since it was available. But Grain did.
If you are curious, give it a go. Expect quirks since I am not a full-time developer. Feedback, feature ideas, and bug reports are always welcome at kenn@grain.computer.
Very cool!
this is cool Kenn. Im working on building a lot of infra around this and providing memory as a service, so really nice to see your thoughts on this!