Controlling the chaos with Neurostack

Sometimes life is chaotic in a way that we barely notice the chaos. It just feels normal, until it doesn’t.

I’m not talking about flashing lights or last-minute emergencies. Instead, there’s the grocery list that ends up in the Notes app while a work reminder sits in an email. The idea that pops into your head while driving disappears before you can get home. The sticky note on the corner of a desk, the calendar reminder you forgot to enter, the conversation you swear you'll remember in three months but won't.

Orlando Sapien found those little pieces of life eventually became impossible to ignore.

Between a full-time career in information technology, a photography business that keeps him shooting weddings and quinceañeras throughout the Borderland, family life and an endless stream of ideas, he found himself spending almost as much time trying to remember things as actually getting them done.

"I developed the app specifically for me to kind of control my chaos," Sapien said. "My family chaos, my business and also work. I had a Post-it note over here. I had an email over there. I had some stuff on my screen. 'Don't forget to do this.' My notes were everywhere. Now they're all right here."

By the end of a conversation with Sapien, one word keeps resurfacing: chaos. He uses it to describe his schedule, his thoughts and the constant juggling act of work and family. It isn't a marketing slogan so much as the problem he set out to solve.

The solution eventually became NeuroStack AIOS, an artificial intelligence-powered organizational tool that Sapien describes less as a note-taking app than as a personal memory system, a "second brain" designed to remember the things the human brain will often discard.

Sapien didn't set out to build a technology company. In fact, he says he never intended anyone else to use the software.

Originally from El Paso, he spent more than two decades in the Seattle area after marrying his high school sweetheart, building a career in technology while teaching himself much of what he knows along the way. But even while working in IT, he never stopped creating.

"I've always been a creator," he said. "Whether it be airbrushing, spray can art, woodworking, photography. That's a big thing I'm into right now. But then I just got creative with AI."

His first experiments with artificial intelligence looked much like everyone else's. He used ChatGPT to rewrite documents, generate ideas and answer questions. As newer AI tools, like Claude, became more sophisticated, however, he began wondering whether they could solve a much more personal problem.

"I originally didn't want to develop an app," he said. "The app was going to be for me, for my photography, because I get really busy. As I was doing it, it just started morphing into something bigger."

The more he built, the more he realized the challenge wasn't unique to him.

Students have deadlines. Teachers juggle lesson plans. Realtors bounce between clients. Parents manage calendars that never seem to slow down. Everyone has information coming from too many directions.

"Anybody that has a lot of chaos in their life can use this app to kind of keep order," he said.

Instead of asking users to file away notes themselves, NeuroStack lets them simply capture information however it arrives. A thought can be spoken into the phone. A whiteboard can be photographed. An email can be forwarded. A website can be saved. Artificial intelligence then sorts the information into categories Sapien calls "Stacks," summarizes it and makes it searchable later.

One feature, appropriately called "Brain Dump," may best illustrate the philosophy behind the software.

"If you have a bunch of things going on in your mind and you really don't know what to do with it, you just record it into my app," he said. "When it's done, it'll organize it for you and kind of give you a better picture of what's going on in your head. You're like, 'I can work with this. This makes sense to me now,' instead of everything that's going on."

For Sapien, that isn't about taking better notes. It's about freeing his mind to focus on something besides remembering.

"I'm trying to buy back time," he said. "I'm trying not to forget stuff that's important to me. I think all humans need that because we all have chaos."

He envisions the software becoming something closer to an extension of memory than a digital filing cabinet.

"The more you use it, the more history it has about you," he said. "You can say, 'Who was that guy that I spoke to about four months ago about this real estate project?' Even though you deleted the note because you already accomplished what you needed to accomplish, it'll still pull it from the cloud. It becomes your memory."

Just as important to him is what the app doesn't do. While concerns over privacy continue to surround artificial intelligence, Sapien says NeuroStack is designed around the individual user rather than collecting information to train outside AI systems.

"It's all encrypted. It's all private. Nothing is shared," he said. "It only learns from you. Nothing else is tapping into my app to train AI outside of it. Everything's within your brain and the app."

That distinction also explains why he doesn't view his product as competing with all the available AI applications.

NeuroStack AIOS is currently in beta testing as Sapien looks for roughly 50 to 100 users willing to put it through its paces, report bugs and suggest improvements before a wider release. Those early users, he said, will receive lifetime access once the software eventually moves to a subscription model.

His ambitions for the software are admittedly lofty. He hopes it becomes a tool people rely on every day, while also proving that innovative technology can come from the Borderland.

"I'd like for El Paso and even Las Cruces to be on the map," he said. "I want people to say, 'Hey, this came from this area.'"

Whether NeuroStack AIOS ultimately becomes that kind of success is a story that will unfold over time. The story Sapien can tell today is simpler.

It began with a desk full of reminders, a mind full of ideas and the realization that controlling chaos wasn't about becoming more organized. It was about creating enough space to think about what mattered next.