Why we built provenance into a notes app

Notes written in the field are good at recording results and reflections, but keeping the flow that led to those results as structure is surprisingly hard. The procedure that lived only in someone's head at the time, the implicit assumptions that didn't make it onto the page, the judgment calls that got summarized away in meeting decks — when you read the notes back years later, those rarely survive together. I felt this myself. More than ten years after stepping away from active experimental wo