How we reimagined human-AI collaboration through Notes, Prompts, and Preprints
January 27, 2025
As you know, illumi is building a collaborative whiteboard where you can work with your real and virtual teammates (aka AI) in real time. At the heart of illumi's whiteboard lies our strategically designed card system. Today, let me take you behind the scenes of how we developed these three essential building blocks: Notes, Prompts, and Preprints.
Think of Notes as digital index cards – quick to write, easy to rearrange, and perfect for capturing those "aha!" moments. Inspired by the Zettelkasten method, these bite-sized pieces of knowledge become the context for your AI interactions. When connected to Prompts, they provide AI with the background it needs to understand your goals better.
Prompts are where the magic of AI collaboration begins. These cards serve as your interface with AI, where you articulate not just what you want to achieve, but how you want to achieve it. By connecting relevant Notes to your Prompt, you provide AI with crucial context – your insights, requirements, and add Notes as background knowledge that help shape more informed and targeted responses.
Preprints are the cards where AI-generated content appears, synthesizing the context from your connected Notes and following the instructions in your Prompts. Think of Notes as your ingredients, Prompts as your recipe - Preprints are where human knowledge and AI capabilities cook together to create something delicious.
The journey to name "Preprint" is perhaps our most interesting design story. After all, we were trying to name something that had never existed before - content created by both human and AI together. It's typically more refined than a human's first draft, thanks to the rich context from Notes and clear direction from Prompts, yet it's not quite a final product either.
What should we call such content? "Answer" sounds too final, as if AI can't make mistakes. "Result" feels mechanical, missing the creative partnership we envision. We even considered "Draft," since that's how most people view AI-generated content today. But given how Notes and Prompts provide such rich context for AI to work with, calling it a "draft" would undervalue the sophistication of this collaborative output.
That's when academia gave us the perfect inspiration: the preprint. In academic publishing, preprints are sophisticated manuscripts shared before peer review - not rough drafts, but well-formed work ready for collaborative refinement. This mirrors exactly what we wanted: AI-generated content that hits the sweet spot between first draft and final version - polished enough to be valuable, yet open to evolution through human expertise.
This academic parallel runs deeper than just the name. Just as preprints in academia spark discussions and accelerate knowledge sharing while maintaining high standards, our Preprint cards create spaces for teams to collaboratively refine AI-generated content. They acknowledge that AI outputs, while powerful and informed by your context, benefit from human expertise and collaboration.
Looking back at our journey to design these cards, reminds us why we built illumi in the first place: to create spaces where human expertise and AI capabilities can truly complement each other. As teams continue to explore this new way of working together, we look forward to seeing how you'll use these building blocks to unlock new possibilities in collaboration. 😎
Subscribe illumi
