I Built an AI Reading Companion with Tree-Structured Conversations (opens in new tab)

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 readin...