Harvest mines a single piece of content and reports anything genuinely useful to your system, tagging each idea with its prior status and ranking it by usefulness, without adopting anything on its own.
Daniel Miessler has released a tool called Harvest, a "skill" for AI assistants that takes one piece of content — an article, a video, anything you can point it at — and turns it into a shortlist of ideas worth keeping. Rather than summarizing the content in the usual way, it compares what it finds against what your system already contains and reports the difference.
Here is how Miessler describes it:
It fetches the content, pulls out candidate ideas and techniques, tags each with a prior status (new / partial / done), ranks by usefulness, and reports where each one maps. It's report-only: adopting anything is always a separate, explicit step.
A few things in that description are worth unpacking. A "skill," in this context, is a saved set of instructions you hand to an AI assistant so it performs a task the same way every time — closer to a recipe than an app. "Prior status" means each idea gets labeled: is this entirely new to you, something you've partially absorbed, or something you've already done? That labeling is the part most summarization tools skip. A normal summary tells you what the content says; Harvest tells you what the content says that you don't already have.
The "report-only" design is the other deliberate choice. The tool does not file anything, change anything, or update your notes. It produces a ranked list and stops. If you want to actually adopt one of the ideas — add it to your notes, try the technique, change a workflow — that happens as a separate step you initiate. That separation matters if you've ever had an assistant enthusiastically reorganize something you didn't ask it to touch.
This is genuinely useful for a non-developer reader, provided one condition holds: you already keep notes or knowledge somewhere an AI assistant can see them. The whole premise is comparison — the tool needs an existing body of material to check new ideas against. If you read a lot of articles or watch a lot of talks and have some kind of running system (a notes app, a folder of documents, a personal wiki), Harvest addresses a real failure mode: finishing something, feeling like you learned things, and then being unable to name a single one a week later. The tagging of "partial" and "done" ideas also prevents a quieter problem — re-saving the same insight every few months because you forgot you'd already found it.
If you don't keep any accumulated notes, the pitch is weaker. It would still extract and rank ideas, but the "prior status" tagging — arguably the distinctive feature — has nothing to compare against.
The description leaves several things unaddressed. "Ranks by usefulness" is doing a lot of work — usefulness to whom, judged how, is not specified, and a ranking produced by the same assistant doing the extracting is not an independent assessment. There's also no stated cost, no list of which assistants or note systems it works with, and no detail on what "fetches the content" covers — whether that includes paywalled articles, video transcripts, or only public web pages is unclear. And the report-only design, while safer, means the tool does nothing unless you act on its output; it produces a to-consider list, not finished work.
Harvest is shipping now, according to Miessler — this is a released tool, not a proposal. Whether it fits your setup depends on questions the announcement doesn't answer, but the underlying idea is sound and easy to test: point it at one article you already know well, and see whether the tagging is honest.