A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense.

For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.

As I've written before, my e-ink writer of choice is a Supernote Nomad. The Nomad does one thing: it removes the exits. No feed, no notifications, no reflex to ask the nearest model. Just the question you're sitting with.

But there’s still a gap: extracting digests and handwritten notes relies on the awkward Supernote Partner desktop app, which doesn't easily support bulk exports. I'm no luddite and use GenAI for a bunch of work, including critique of ideas and iteration on writing. If I can't automatically pipe my focused thinking into Obsidian or my AI workflows, my system for thought breaks. It doesn't help that the Python sync libraries that used to work no longer do.

Introducing supernote-cli

So I extracted supernote-cli from my note management scripts to fix the plumbing and introduce a few conveniences. Here are some examples of usage:

Extract handwritten notes and show their on-device transcript:

$ supernote notebook ls --limit 3
 1251704792368021505  2026-04-22  A2A ideation for Agent book
 1254057731111780353  2026-04-24  San Francisco Note, April 20
 1254579462477971456  2026-04-27  20260424_081053

$ supernote nb 1254057731111780353
## Page 1
Excited to do that again it's been over a decade since I
went to that space and <redacted> is kind of a hero for me.
...

List annotated documents and extract handwritten highlights and notes, and transcribe them with a local VLM.

$ supernote annotation ls --limit 4
Breath_The_New_Science_of_a_Lost_Art_James_Nestor.pdf
 833859954824708096  Apr 18 17:43  Any gum chewing can strengthen the jaw a (A)
 833859955948781568  Apr 18 17:45  TUMMO There are two forms of Tummo—one t (A)
 833859956464680960  Apr 18 17:49  Breathhold Walking Anders Olsson uses th
 833859957852995584  Apr 18 18:00  Close the mouth and inhale quietly throu (A)

$ supernote an 833859955948781568
> Any gum chewing can strengthen the jaw and stimulate stem cell growth, but harder textured varieties offer a more vigorous workout.

seems ridiculous — so do night guards do the same?  

Extract inbox highlights from notes using a custom VLM prompt:

$ supernote nb 1254579462477971456 --prompt "Whenever you see a line beginning with → or ☐ or ☑, transcribe the rest of the line (including any continuation onto subsequent lines) and include the leading → or ☐ or ☑ at the start of the output line. Emit nothing for any other lines."

☐ Finish supernote - cli blog
☐ Efoil: block hole w/ Epoxy (and fix up wiring)
☐ Canada passport renew & send.
☐ Summarize Tillich

Check it out on GitHub.

The scarce input in the AI era isn't prompts or models; it's focused thinking. Synthesis gets cheaper each year, while deep work gets harder. The pen-and-paper thing isn't nostalgia but a line of defense.