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Sparks

Sparks is Sylva's nightly insight engine — it reads across your conversations, captures, notes, and tasks and surfaces a small handful of non-obvious ideas, perspectives, connections, and questions.

What Sparks does

Every night, Sylva quietly reads across the activity in your second brain — your conversations, captures, notes, tasks, and topics — and looks for things you might not have noticed yourself. Not a summary. Not a to-do list. Sparks is specifically tuned to surface:

  • Ideas worth exploring
  • Perspectives that reframe what you're working on
  • Connections between things that live in different parts of Sylva
  • Questions you might be avoiding

The result lands in the Sparks page (lightbulb icon in the sidebar), capped at three per night so it stays a treat, not a chore.

Available on Pro and above

Sparks runs nightly AI work that goes beyond the free tier's quota. Pro, Executive, and Founders plans get it.

Opening Sparks

Click the Lightbulb in the sidebar. A small badge shows how many sparks are unseen. Opening the page automatically marks them as seen so the badge clears.

Reading a spark

Each spark is a short card:

  • A coloured kind tag (Idea / Perspective / Connection / Question)
  • A 1–3 sentence body
  • Source chips — clickable links back to the threads, captures, notes, tasks, or topics the spark drew from. This is how Sylva shows its work.
  • 👍 / 👎 / Save / Dismiss buttons

Tuning Sparks to your taste

Your thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings are the main control. The next night's run uses your last ten upvoted and downvoted titles as a signal — Sparks drifts toward the kinds of observations you find valuable and away from the kinds you don't.

If three sparks in a row get a thumbs-down, Sparks pauses for seven days. It is better to be quiet than to keep wasting your attention.

Run now

The Run now button at the top of the page asks Sylva to look immediately instead of waiting for tonight. If there is not enough new activity since the last run, Sylva will tell you so and won't fabricate filler.

Filters

  • All — every active spark (default)
  • New — sparks generated since you last opened the page
  • Saved — sparks you tapped Save on; kept indefinitely

Retention

  • Saved sparks are kept forever
  • Unsaved sparks are auto-archived after 30 days so the page stays current
  • Archived sparks are gone from the UI but can be excluded in admin queries

Why Sparks might be quiet

Sparks only runs when something has actually changed in your second brain. If you've had a quiet week, expect a quiet Sparks page — that's by design. Quality over volume.

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