Notes that file themselves
Topics are the part of tentus that does the filing you never asked it to do. Here's how a workspace organizes itself without a folder in sight.
We said in an earlier post that a second brain shouldn't ask you to organize it. Topics is the feature that makes good on that.
What it actually does
Every day, tentus looks at the notes in your workspace and asks a simple question: which of these are actually about the same thing? Not by tag, not by folder — by the same signals a person would use if they read everything you'd written. Shared entities across two notes. Semantic closeness between passages. Chains of connection that span more than a pair.
When enough notes cluster around a real theme, tentus gives that cluster a name and a home on /topics. No note ever has to be dragged there. No one has to decide, in advance, that "Q3 hiring" was going to become a category.
Why threshold matters more than the algorithm
We deliberately didn't reach for k-means or a heavyweight clustering library. A workspace under five notes doesn't get organized at all — there's nothing yet worth grouping, and forcing structure onto five stray captures just manufactures busywork. Above that, connections are followed to their full transitive closure: if note A relates to B, and B relates to C, all three belong together even if A and C never directly touch. That's closer to how a person's own mental map actually works than a fixed-radius cluster would be.
The override, because "the system knows best" is a lie sometimes
Auto-organization earns trust by being right most of the time and correctable the rest. Every note in a topic carries a small menu: pin it somewhere else, or exclude it from clustering entirely. Both are one click. Neither requires you to understand or fight the underlying algorithm — you're not editing a taxonomy, you're just telling tentus it got one note wrong.
What this replaces
The folder tree you'd otherwise build by hand, decide poorly, and abandon within a month. The tag system you'd promise yourself you'd keep consistent. The Sunday-afternoon "let me finally organize my notes" session that never actually happens.
Topics doesn't ask for any of that. It just runs, quietly, in the background — the same bargain as everything else in tentus: capture without friction, and let the software do the filing.