01 / The spark
I kept watching smart people make messy decisions.
Friends would agonize over a job offer for weeks and still second-guess it after taking it. Classmates would win an argument by talking the loudest, not by making the better case. I did the same thing to myself more than once, circling a decision for days before realizing I’d never actually pinned down what I was deciding.
It was never a lack of intelligence, and it was never a lack of information. What was missing, every time, was structure.
02 / The framework
The structure already existed. I just hadn’t seen it yet.
My teacher, John Trapasso, had spent years teaching a framework for exactly this: work a question all the way through, one layer at a time, grounded in the Paul–Elder model for critical thinking. When he shared it with me, the gap I kept running into finally made sense.
03 / The build
So I built it.
Houses of Thought is that framework, built into software. It walks the same structure Trapasso teaches: the AI pushes on your thinking at every layer, but it never writes the conclusion for you. I built it as a student because the method changed how I made decisions, and there wasn’t a good reason to keep it to myself.
Created by Samir Sogani. Based on John Trapasso’s classroom model, derived from the Paul–Elder model for critical thinking.