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The Two-Repository System for Thought Leaders

How AI-first documentation can transform how you build, organize, and share knowledge​

August 24, 2025

Gary Sheng

After building out my own AI-first documentation and workspace, I've discovered something powerful: most thought leaders, writers, and knowledge workers are severely limiting themselves by not having proper knowledge infrastructure.

Whether you're a blogger, journalist, novelist, philosopher, CEO, or anyone who needs to express complex ideas that build on each other, you need two distinct but connected repositories. This isn't just about organization—it's about creating a system where every new piece of content you create can leverage everything you've previously written, researched, and learned.

The Two-Repository Framework​

Repository 1: Your Private Workspace This is your daily thinking environment. Similar to this repository you're looking at right now—a comprehensive workspace containing:

  • Meeting notes and interaction records
  • Research in progress
  • Draft ideas and explorations
  • Personal reflections and development
  • Relationship documentation
  • Strategic planning documents

This workspace is where you live and work. It's messy, exploratory, and constantly evolving. The key is that it's hypercontextually linked, meaning every conversation, meeting, and interaction compounds on previous ones. You never forget important insights because they're all interconnected.

Repository 2: Your Public Knowledge System This is your crystallized thinking made accessible. It's a source of truth repository that could be:

  • Completely public (open source knowledge)
  • Team/organization access only
  • Client or audience-specific
  • Personal reference system

This repository contains your most refined frameworks, methodologies, principles, and teachings. It's heavily hyperlinked, making complex knowledge systems navigable and usable.

The Compounding Value Proposition​

Here's what makes this approach transformative: every new artifact you create can access all your previous research, insights, and frameworks as reusable building blocks.

Instead of starting from scratch each time you write, speak, or create, you're building on a foundation that grows stronger with every addition. Your past work becomes an investment that pays dividends forever.

Most people using Notion, Google Docs, or other traditional tools hit a wall. They may pay thousands for a particular research project or strategic document, but using that work to generate derivative content is unnecessarily difficult. The knowledge gets siloed instead of becoming a foundation for future work.

Why Cursor Changes Everything​

Most people think Cursor is just for developers building applications. That's missing the bigger opportunity.

Cursor's greatest user base will be non-dev knowledge workers:

  • AI-native file management: Unlike traditional word processors, Cursor understands the relationships between all your documents
  • Contextual intelligence: The AI can reference your entire knowledge base when helping you create new content
  • Version control: Built on Git, so you have complete history and can collaborate without losing work
  • Cross-document linking: Natural hyperlinking between ideas across your entire system
  • Markdown-native: Clean, future-proof formatting that ages well

The far bigger audience for Cursor isn't developers—it's writers, researchers, consultants, executives, and anyone who thinks for a living.

Example: My Faith Walk OS​

The best example I can point to is my Faith Walk OS—a comprehensive documentation of my lived faith journey. It's one of the most thorough, accessible, and well-formatted corpuses of someone's spiritual development I've ever seen.

This wasn't created as a one-off project. It emerged organically from having proper knowledge infrastructure. Every spiritual insight, every conversation about faith, every piece of theological learning builds on what came before.

The result is a living system that helps me:

  • Make better decisions by referencing past spiritual lessons
  • Share my faith journey with others in a systematic way
  • Build new content that draws from years of documented growth
  • Never lose important spiritual insights or breakthrough moments

The Business Opportunity​

I help people build both repositories:

Private Workspace Consulting: Organizing your daily thinking environment so every meeting, relationship, and interaction compounds. This is particularly valuable for:

  • Executives with complex stakeholder relationships
  • Consultants who need to reference past client work
  • Researchers building on previous investigations
  • Anyone who has important conversations they want to leverage

Public Repository Development: Creating accessible knowledge systems that serve your audience while establishing you as the definitive source on your area of expertise.

Getting Started​

For your private workspace:

  1. Start documenting every meaningful interaction
  2. Create templates for recurring meeting types
  3. Build relationship profiles for key people in your network
  4. Link related conversations and insights
  5. Use AI to help you find patterns and connections

For your public repository:

  1. Identify your core frameworks and methodologies
  2. Create comprehensive guides for your key concepts
  3. Build extensive cross-references between ideas
  4. Make it searchable and navigable for your audience
  5. Update it regularly as your thinking evolves

Why This Matters Now​

The world changes through communication. As AI becomes more powerful, the people who have well-organized, accessible knowledge systems will have massive advantages over those who don't.

Most thought leaders are sitting on gold mines of insights, frameworks, and wisdom that are essentially unusable because they're trapped in scattered documents, forgotten emails, and disconnected notes.

The two-repository system changes that. It turns your accumulated knowledge into a living, growing asset that makes everything you create better and more valuable.

Whether you're building a business, writing a book, developing a methodology, or just trying to make sense of your own expertise, this infrastructure pays dividends forever.

Your thoughts are too valuable to lose. Your insights are too important to scatter. Build the systems that let your knowledge compound.

Market Opportunity​

The knowledge management space is massive but fragmented. Existing solutions like Building a Second Brain ($1,000-$2,000+ courses) and the PARA Method focus on traditional note-taking apps like Notion and Obsidian. None leverage Cursor's unique AI-native, git-based approach.

Current market gaps:

  • No systematic training on Cursor for knowledge work (only coding courses exist)
  • Traditional PKM tools lack the contextual intelligence and version control that Cursor provides
  • Thought leaders struggle with scattered information across multiple platforms
  • AI-enhanced knowledge management is underexplored despite growing demand

First-mover advantage: This two-repository framework represents a new category at the intersection of AI tools, knowledge management, and thought leadership monetization. The opportunity exists to establish definitive expertise in an emerging field before competition develops.

Target market: Knowledge workers, consultants, executives, writers, researchers, and thought leaders who generate substantial intellectual property and need better systems for organization, reuse, and monetization.

Ready to build your knowledge infrastructure? This is exactly the kind of system I help thought leaders create. Your accumulated wisdom deserves better than scattered documents and forgotten insights.