AI makes you productive where you already understand. It confuses you where you don't.
I've been reading non-fiction with AI assistants for a while, and I kept hitting the same wall: 30 messages into a conversation about a dense book chapter, the AI starts losing the thread. I'd branch into a tangent — "how does this connect to what Kahneman said about System 1?" — and suddenly the entire chat context is polluted. No way to get back to where I was.
So I built pi-tree — a self-hosted AI reading companion where the conversation is the reading experience. The key insight: conversations should be trees, not threads.
Why Trees?
When you think through complex material, your mind doesn't work linearly. You branch — "wait, how does this relate to X?" — explore for a bit, then come back. But every AI chat tool forces you into a flat thread where everything piles up.
