Flat Chat Threads Suck for Reading Books. So I Built a Local-First AI Tree Companion. (opens in new tab)

I was reading books with Pi in the terminal — a minimalist AI agent with tree-structured conversations — and it was genuinely the best way I'd ever read non-fiction. Branch into a tangent, explore it deeply, jump back without losing context. Every session was a map of how I actually thought about the material. But it was a terminal tool. My wife reads more books than I do. My kids are curious about everything but need something they can click around in. My parents would never open a terminal....