Introducing Thinking Tools Software
Plain-text knowledge tools, visualised on demand. Files you own. Concept maps for getting your team — and the AI coding agents you work alongside — on the same page.
Why Plain Text?
Most thinking tools trap your ideas inside proprietary formats. Open the file in another application and you get a mess of XML, binary data, or an inscrutable JSON blob. Your domain knowledge belongs to your team — not to the software vendor’s file format.
Thinking Tools Software is built around a different belief: your data should live in plain text files you can read, edit, search, version control, and back up using any tool you already own. A concept map is just a Markdown file with propositions like “Customer places Order” or “Deposit is a Commercial Transaction”. A process model will be a structured text file you can diff in Git, open in VS Code, or grep through on the command line.
This approach forces us to make the text format good enough to stand on its own — which turns out to be a liberating constraint. When the file format is legible, your team understands its own data. When it is version-controllable, engineering teams can manage their domain models the way they manage code. When it is plain text, it works with every editor, every backup tool, and — increasingly — every AI coding agent that joins the team.
The First Tool: Concepticon
Concepticon is a desktop application for creating concept maps of the language your team uses to talk about its domain. You write propositions in plain text — two or more concepts connected by a phrase — and Concepticon turns them into an interactive graph.
The design started with a question: what if a concept-mapping tool worked the way a domain expert and a developer work at a whiteboard? Capture ideas in any sequence. Change your mind freely — add a proposition, rephrase another, remove one — until the picture feels right. Then let Concepticon generate as many views of the result as you need to share your clarified thinking with the team.
From there, the application adds the things a screen does better than a whiteboard: automatic layout, focus views that zoom into one neighbourhood at a time, AI-assisted generation from documents or web pages, full keyboard navigation, and rich concept descriptions rendered from Markdown.
Concepticon is designed to be accessible by default. I am legally blind, which means screen reader compatibility and keyboard navigation aren’t afterthoughts — they are first-class requirements built into every feature from the start.
What’s Coming
The suite will grow to cover other kinds of structured thinking. Next is Processium — a process modelling tool based on IDEF0, a notation developed for describing complex processes and the data that flows between them. After that, Logicon — for capturing the Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes (current and future reality trees, conflict resolution, prerequisite chains) as plain-text logic that can be navigated and shared.
All of them will follow the same philosophy: plain text in, visualised on demand, files always yours.