Sources · Personal source · export guide
Export WhatsApp chats into a private AI brain — signal only
WhatsApp is where your real relationships live, and it is the one export most people would never let near an AI. This source reads nothing but the sender and the timestamp.
What a WhatsApp export holds — and what the brain makes of it
WhatsApp has no archive download; it exports one chat at a time as a text file. The brain builder treats each file as a signal, not a transcript: it parses the sender name and the date on every line and stops there. What comes out is a contact graph — the people you actually talk to — with a per-person frequency and recency that becomes relationship strength on their note. Someone you message weekly ranks above a LinkedIn connection you accepted once in 2019.
That is the whole point of a signal-only source. When the brain answers "who should I reach out to about this?", the WhatsApp signal is what separates a warm tie from a cold one — without a single message ever entering the vault.
Get the export
How to export your WhatsApp data
The exact clicks, as they are today. Platforms move menus; the engine’s source docs are updated when they do.
- 01
Open a chat → ⋮ → More → Export chat → Without media
- 02
Save the .txt — repeat for the chats that matter
- 03
Drop the archive on WhatsApp in Studio’s Sources — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.
Then, next month
An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.
Then ask it
What you can ask a brain built from WhatsApp
Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.
- Who do I talk to most, and which of them are not in my LinkedIn network?
- Which close contacts have I gone quiet with in the last six months?
- Which of the people I know in Lisbon do I actually talk to?
limitExport the chats that matter, one at a time and without media; group chats contribute their participants, nothing more.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Does it read what we wrote? No. The parser stops at the sender — message text is never read, by design, and the privacy model is enforced in open code you can read.
Why export without media? Photos and voice notes are not used, and the export is much smaller and faster without them.
Start
Your WhatsApp export already exists. Turn it into a brain.
Free and open source. Start with John’s demo brain while your export arrives.
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