Simon Willison’s Weblog

GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world.

Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes.

Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus you can drag and drop images or videos directly onto a note.

It has fantastic inter-linking abilities. You can paste in URLs to other issues (in any other repository on GitHub) in a markdown list like this:

- https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1078
- https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1080

Your issue will pull in the title of the other issue, plus that other issue will get back a link to yours - taking issue visibility rules into account.

It has excellent search, both within a repo, across all of your repos or even across the whole of GitHub if you've completely forgotten where you put something.

It has a comprehensive API, both for exporting notes and creating and editing new ones. Add GitHub Actions, triggered by issue events, and you can automate it to do almost anything.

The one missing feature? Synchronized offline support. I still mostly default to Apple Notes on my phone purely because it works with or without the internet and syncs up with my laptop later on.

A few extra notes inspired by the discussion of this post on Hacker News:

• I'm not worried about privacy here. A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to keep the source code and related assets safe. I do not think GitHub are going to sacrifice that trust to "train a model" or whatever.
• There is always the risk of bug that might expose my notes, across any note platform. That's why I keep things like passwords out of my notes!
• Not paying and not self-hosting is a very important feature. I don't want to risk losing my notes to a configuration or billing error!
• The thing where notes can include checklists using - [ ] item syntax is really useful. You can even do - [ ] #ref to reference another issue and the checkbox will be automatically checked when that other issue is closed.
• I've experimented with a bunch of ways of backing up my notes locally, such as github-to-sqlite. I'm not running any of them on cron on a separate machine at the moment, but I really should!
• I'll go back to pen and paper as soon as my paper notes can be instantly automatically backed up to at least two different continents.
• GitHub issues also scales! microsoft/vscode has 195,376 issues. flutter/flutter has 106,572. I'm not going to run out of space.
• Having my notes in a format that's easy to pipe into an LLM is really fun. Here's a recent example where I summarized a 50+ comment, 1.5 year long issue thread into a new comment using llm-fragments-github.

I was curious how many issues and comments I've created on GitHub. With Claude's help I figured out you can get that using a GraphQL query:

{
  viewer {
    issueComments {
      totalCount
    }
    issues {
      totalCount
    }
  }
}

Running that with the GitHub GraphQL Explorer tool gave me this:

{
  "data": {
    "viewer": {
      "issueComments": {
        "totalCount": 39087
      },
      "issues": {
        "totalCount": 9413
      }
    }
  }
}

That's 48,500 combined issues and comments!