Neeos can write to your journal. It can't read it..

On August 17th I made a call that shaped a lot of what came after: the AI should never know what's in your journal. A journal is the one place people write things they wouldn't say out loud, and an assistant that reads it, even to be helpful, crosses a line a lot of people would not want crossed.

The rule

Neeos can create a journal entry if you ask it to, such as "write down that today was a good day". It cannot read an entry back, search through your entries, quote one, summarize them, or show you one as a source. It isn't just kept out of the automatic background context. The door is shut entirely.

Then we checked, and it wasn't shut

A rule written on paper doesn't protect anyone, so two days later we audited the code against it. We found several places where journal text could still have reached the AI: five different tools that, in one way or another, passed entries along, and a path through the search feed. Those got closed, and a second safeguard was added so that a new tool can't quietly reintroduce the problem.

On August 20th I also had to take back something I'd said. I'd told myself a fix had landed. It was sitting on a side branch and had never been merged. The records now say so plainly, and the real fix is in.

What you give up

This costs something. Because the assistant can't read your journal, it can't answer "what was I worried about in March?". I decided that's the right trade. The compensation I'd like is a search you can use yourself, run on your own phone and invisible to the assistant. That isn't built yet, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

The assistant is designed not to read journal entries. I'm careful to put it that way, because the claim I can stand behind is the design and the checks, not an absolute promise about every possible bug.

Written October 21, 2026 from the build log, and dated to when this happened.