AI-PKM and the Rise of Transfer Modules: Making Minds Modular

For years I’ve been intrigued by the idea of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) for humans—systems to organize our notes and brains. Lately I’ve been asking: why not do the same for AI? Enter Transfer Modules (TMs), my attempt at making AI minds modular. A Transfer Module is basically a portable “brainfile” for an AI agent. It’s a plain text file (following a spec I’m developing) that encapsulates a chunk of knowledge or a particular skill. The cool part is you can hot-swap these modules between different AI agents, kind of like swapping game cartridges.

Here’s a simple example: say I have an AI that’s really good at answering questions about gardening. I can package its gardening know-how into a TM file. Now, if I spin up a new AI agent that needs gardening knowledge, I don’t have to train it from scratch or dump a whole encyclopedia into the prompt. I just load the gardening TM. Suddenly, the new agent has all that info at its fingertips. In practice, what’s inside a TM could be facts, guidelines, even personality quirks—whatever context an agent needs to perform a task.

Building this system (I call it build-tms.ai for now) has been a fascinating project. On the backend I’m using Python and a vector database to handle retrieving the right bits of knowledge from a module when a question comes in. I also defined a JSON schema for TMs so they have a standard structure (making sure one module can work across different agents consistently). It feels like I’m designing a mini-internet for AI knowledge, where each module is like a webpage or an API endpoint that an AI can consult.

We’re still at the beginning of this “modular mind” concept, but I’m excited about the possibilities. Imagine communities sharing TMs for everything—one for cooking tips, one for a specific programming language, one that encodes the style of Shakespeare. It could democratize how AI systems learn new things, shifting from monolithic models to mix-and-match brains. I don’t know if Transfer Modules will catch on broadly, but even for my own projects, it’s already proving its worth. My AI agents feel more flexible and less like black boxes. And as someone who loves organizing information, giving AI a way to neatly package and swap knowledge just feels right.