Our True Mission

Why We Build With AI, Not For It

At Open Knowledge of New York, our mission is simple: help people think and work better, with AI as a tool and not a replacement. Everything we have built, starting with NoteBar™ and Wendell, is designed around one belief: technology should expand your capacity to make decisions, not have it make them for you.

We built it the way we’re asking people to use it

OKNY itself is a small case study in that philosophy. Our founder, Josh Wisoff, started the company with a small team of interns, using AI as a tool throughout the process. The productivity tools he has created came from a real, specific need he had for his own creative writing. AI didn’t tell him “build a note-taking app” or “build a writing workspace.” He had the need, and simply used AI to help him get there faster.

As Josh puts it, “Claude allows me to ship like a whole team by myself.” By running multiple AI agents in parallel, he can explore and build on several ideas at once without waiting for one idea to be finished before starting the next. When that process created its own challenges, like code conflicts and an overwhelming review process, he used AI to build a code review agent and automate the merge queue.

(Read more about how Josh created OKNY: https://okny.io/2026/07/06/i-started-a-software-company-to-finish-a-story/)

That’s the distinction we care about: AI as a companion, not a substitute.

Photo by Tara Winstead

We know AI is a loaded word right now

A lot of professionals, especially people early in their careers, are genuinely anxious about what AI means for the job market and for the value of their own skills. That’s a reasonable thing to feel, and we don’t think the answer is to tell people not to worry about it.

What we do believe is that AI is now a permanent part of how knowledge work gets done, and the more useful question is what kind of relationship we build with it. Tools that quietly take over decisions erode the skills and judgment that made people valuable in the first place. Tools that stay visible, reviewable, and in the user’s control do the opposite: they let people move faster without losing the thread of their own work.

What we’re actually trying to prove

Our bet is that human oversight and AI assistance are a partnership that gets more out of both. NoteBar™ and Wendell are our attempt to build that partnership into the product itself, not just talk about it. If we’re right, that’s a small piece of evidence that AI can push industries and individual careers forward without asking people to hand over the wheel.

Visit notebar.ai and wendell.app to learn more about each produc and join the waitlist for either or both products!