> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.peernotes.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Topics: automatic clustering of your PeerNotes thoughts

> Topics are the themes running through your thinking. The PeerNotes agent clusters your thoughts into topics automatically — no manual filing required.

**Topics** are the themes your thinking keeps returning to. Instead of asking you to build and maintain a folder structure, PeerNotes watches what you capture and clusters related thoughts into topics automatically. Your organization emerges from your thinking — not the other way around.

## How topics work

As you capture thoughts, the PeerNotes agent reads them and groups the ones that belong together. A topic might form around a project, a question you keep circling, a book you're reading, or a theme you didn't realize was on your mind until the cluster appeared.

You can also tag topics yourself — while capturing a thought, or later from the thought's topic editor. Manual tags and agent clustering work together: you stay in control, the agent does the tedious part.

<Tip>
  Don't wait to "set up" topics before you start capturing. Capture freely for a week and let the agent show you what your topics actually are.
</Tip>

## Browse by topic

Topics show up everywhere your content lives:

* **The Topics page** shows every topic in your notebook, with a timeline of activity so you can see which themes are heating up and which have gone quiet.
* **The Topics panel** in the Thoughts feed shows your topics at a glance. Select one (or several) to filter the feed to just those threads of thinking.
* **Topic chips** on thoughts, notes, and articles let you jump from any item to everything else on the same theme.

## From topic to note

Topics are the natural starting point for writing. When a topic has accumulated a critical mass of thoughts:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open the topic">
    Review the thoughts the agent has gathered — often there's already the skeleton of an argument in there.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Select the thoughts worth keeping">
    Pick the ones that hold up. Leave the rest — not every fragment needs to become prose.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Convert to Note">
    Use **Convert to Note** to compile your selection into a draft, then structure and refine it in the [note editor](/core-concepts/notes).
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Info>
  Topics span your whole pipeline: filter articles by topic, tag notes with topics, and trace a published article back through its notes to the raw thoughts — all along the same theme.
</Info>