How the pond works
Your ideas are the fish; you are the ponderer. Catch every thought the moment it surfaces, feed the ones you believe in, and let the water show you — honestly, by fading ink — which ones you've been neglecting.
Dropping an idea in, on the web
Click any open water. The idea lands exactly where you clicked.
Type the thought and press ↵. The chips under the box choose what it lands as — bubble, fry, or fish; ⇥ switches, esc changes your mind. A big fish can't be planted at all: that rung is earned, never claimed.
Or from a conversation
The pond speaks MCP. Connect it once, then capture from wherever you already are.
In Claude, add the pond as a connector and sign in when it asks; for anything else that speaks MCP, mint a token on the Connections page. Then “toss that in the pond” mid-conversation is all it takes — feeding, graduating and sharing live there too. The water is for looking, dropping in, and tending what's already swimming.
The ladder
Every idea sits on a rung: bubble, fry, fish, big fish. Moving one up is you saying you believe in it more — the rungs are the rating, and the big fish are simply the handful you're actually pursuing.
Feeding
An idea is fed whenever you touch it — a note, some progress, a rung climbed.
Feeding resets the clock. A fed fish keeps its ink; an unfed one fades a little every day and sinks, until three weeks on it is barely a watermark. Nothing is deleted for you — the fading is the reminder.
Ripe bubbles
Bubbles never pop on their own.
After two weeks untouched a bubble goes ripe — a dashed outline in the water. Open it and decide: keep it, hatch it into a fry, or pop it. Popping is painless, and a popped bubble can always be fished back out later.
Belly up
Killing an idea is cheap and reversible — that's the point.
A dead fish floats upside down at the surface until you revive it or archive it. Archive means resolved; belly up just means nobody believes in it right now. Deliberately dead fish are left out of the hunger standings — dead is not the same as neglected.
The card, and the brush
Click a fish to read it: its notes, its rung, how long since it was fed.
Your own live fish carry a brush. It opens the fish for redrawing — deal a different pattern, go bare, or ink it by hand; everyone who can see the fish sees your art. Redrawing is grooming, not feeding: it never resets the clock.
Deeper water, and the list
The pond is deeper than the screen.
Scroll to sink through the layers, and watch the depth readout in the corner. The tools at the bottom left find a fish by name, put names on every fish, or flip to the list — the same water read as a page, sortable by hunger, rung, name or age.
Ponds, and company
Your own pond is private because nobody else is in it.
Invite someone and the same water is communal: members can read what's shared with them, but sharing never moves ownership — only you can change your ideas. The pond is free to swim in; keeping more than twenty ideas alive is what the deep end is for.
What to say
There are no commands to learn. Once connected, you just say what you mean — these are only examples of what works.
What it can do unprompted
can you look at the pond and put the ideas into relevant groups
Used Ponderfish integration
Done. The pond now has three groups:
- Ponderfish (6): Wonderlism Pond, Pond membership with accounts, Visitor ponds in the browser, Public pond for Wonderlism YouTube, Three.js pond visual, plus the Idea rating system bubble I added.
- Live video mixer (3, new): thriftrig.com, brokecast.com, squidmix.com — the three name candidates.
- Art installations (1, new): the hydraulic weight-lifting piece.
I left "the introvert CRM" ungrouped since it's a standalone product idea, and skipped "test" and the belly-up air conditioned socks. Want me to move the CRM or rename any of the groups?
One sentence, and it read every idea in the pond, worked out which belonged together, invented the group names, and then said what it had deliberately not done — leaving a standalone idea alone, skipping a dead one. That is the difference between a tool you operate and one you talk to.
Catching a thought
The cheapest thing you can do, and the one that matters most.
- “toss that in the pond”
- “new idea: a tin of fish as the archive”
- “remember this one — the onboarding email sequence”
- “I'm working on the pond rewrite, add it as a fish”
Passing thoughts land as bubbles, which cost nothing. Nothing you say is ever refused for being vague.
Keeping one alive
Feeding is the everyday act. It resets how long an idea has gone untouched.
- “I worked on the pond today”
- “add to Ponderfish: schools ship, camera next”
- “the rating system is a real project now”
- “I'm going all in on the video mixer”
Ideas climb one rung at a time: bubble, fry, fish, big fish. A fed fish keeps its ink; a forgotten one fades and sinks.
Sorting them out
Groups are topics. In your pond they swim together as a school.
- “look at the pond and put the ideas into relevant groups”
- “file the mixer names under Live video mixer”
- “what groups do I have?”
- “show me everything in Ponderfish”
You never create a group first — naming one is enough. Near-misses join the group that already exists instead of quietly starting a second one.
Letting go
Killing an idea is cheap and reversible, which is the point.
- “the socks idea is dead”
- “actually, bring the socks back”
- “archive the three.js pond visual, it shipped”
A dead idea floats belly-up at the surface until you revive it or archive it. Archive means resolved; belly-up means nobody believes in it right now.
Sharing water
A communal pond is an audience. Your own pond stays yours.
- “share the rating system with the Ponderfish pond”
- “what ponds am I in?”
- “get me an invite link for the team pond”
Sharing never moves ownership: members can read what you share, but only you can change it.
Asking what you're forgetting
The report the whole thing exists to produce.
- “what am I forgetting?”
- “how are my ideas doing?”
- “what's gone quiet?”
Everything in the water, longest unfed at the top. Ideas you deliberately killed are left out — dead is not the same as neglected.
Not connected yet?
The Connections page has the URL to give Claude — it signs you in from there — and mints tokens for Claude Code, ChatGPT, or anything else that speaks MCP. The pond does not care where an idea came from.