Andrew's Wiki

README — Andrew's Personal Wiki

5 min read

README — Andrew’s Personal Wiki

A dialogue-driven intelligence engine. Andrew and Claude process Andrew’s 7 years of personal notes (2,032 from Simplenote, 47 from an older Obsidian vault) one at a time, finding what still resonates, threading connections, and turning the conversation into a compounding knowledge graph that gets published to the world.

This README lives in _meta/ because it’s part of the wiki’s story — not external scaffolding. It gets published alongside the rest of the wiki at /meta/README.

Why this exists

The starting hypothesis: a personal corpus of notes, deeply understood, becomes an intelligence engine when it’s:

  • Connected — wikilinks turn isolated thoughts into a graph
  • Compounding — each new note enriches the existing pages, cross-references update
  • Public — readers comment, ideas spread, the wiki becomes a publishing pipeline

Inspired by Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern (compilation over retrieval, LLMs do the maintenance) and Visakanv’s threading (the value isn’t the note, it’s the connections between notes).

Architecture

Three layers, plus a publishing pipeline.

andrew-personal-wiki/
├── CLAUDE.md           ← session bootstrap for any Claude working here
├── README.md (this file, in _meta)
│
├── sources/            ← raw input notes (immutable, never edited)
│   ├── simplenote/     ← 2,032 notes from Simplenote export
│   └── obsidian-vault/ ← 47 notes from older Obsidian vault
│
├── wiki/               ← processed idea pages (Obsidian vault + Quartz content)
│   ├── index.md        ← homepage
│   ├── *.md            ← idea pages built through dialogue
│   └── meta/           ← symlink to ../_meta — meta pages live in the wiki
│
├── _meta/              ← process artifacts
│   ├── log.md          ← processing journal (private — has raw reflections)
│   ├── TODO.md         ← cross-cutting tasks (private)
│   ├── process.md      ← evolving methodology (public)
│   ├── index.md        ← wiki index by theme (public)
│   ├── ideas.md        ← ideas for evolving the workflow (public)
│   └── README.md       ← this file (public)
│
├── quartz/             ← Quartz v4 publishing pipeline
│   ├── content -> ../wiki  ← symlink so wiki = site content
│   ├── quartz.config.ts
│   └── quartz.layout.ts
│
├── dashboard.ts        ← live progress dashboard (bun run dashboard.ts)
└── import-simplenote.ts ← one-time importer for Simplenote export

Two load-bearing symlinks:

  • quartz/content → ../wiki (Quartz reads from our wiki)
  • wiki/meta → ../_meta (meta pages appear in the wiki under /meta/)

How a note becomes a wiki page

The processing pipeline (full version in process.md):

  1. Read & Present — Claude quotes the source note verbatim. No commentary, no analysis.
  2. Ask — Claude asks: “How should we process this?” Andrew leads.
  3. Dialogue — Andrew talks through what resonates, what’s changed, what connects.
  4. Wiki integration — Claude creates/updates wiki pages with [[wikilinks]].
  5. Meta update — log the session, update index.
  6. Commit — every few notes.
  7. Reflect every 5–10 notes — what patterns emerged?

Voice convention: Andrew’s words quoted faithfully (filler removed), Claude refers to Andrew in third person. Two minds, visibly.

Publishing

Pages with publish: true in YAML frontmatter get built into the public site by Quartz’s ExplicitPublish filter. Per-page conscious decision — never bulk-add publish: true.

Drafts (draft: true) can also be public — the wiki is a working garden, not a finished product.

To preview locally:

cd quartz
bun install        # one-time
bun run quartz build --serve
# → http://localhost:8080

To deploy to production:

cd quartz
netlify deploy --prod --dir=public

CI/CD: Netlify watches main branch and rebuilds automatically (configured via quartz/netlify.toml).

Stack

  • Bun for everything (no npm/node)
  • Quartz v4 for static site generation (Preact + esbuild)
  • Obsidian for editing (the wiki/ directory IS the vault)
  • Giscus for public comments (backed by GitHub Discussions)
  • GoatCounter for analytics (free, privacy-first, no cookie banner)
  • Netlify for hosting and CI/CD

Status

  • 8/25 pinned notes processed (Apr 2026)
  • 37+ published wiki pages: idea pages from dialogue, plus prose imported from old.ajr.fyi (poetry, essays, assorted links, about gallery)
  • 5 meta pages (3 published: process, ideas, README; 2 private: TODO, log)
  • 1 unpublished page (Advice for Stephen — kept in repo)
  • 47 obsidian-vault files merged as sources, awaiting processing
  • 2,000+ Simplenote notes still in the queue
  • Live at https://ajr.fyi (Quartz on Netlify)
  • Old personal site preserved at https://old.ajr.fyi

Live progress dashboard: bun run dashboard.ts → http://localhost:3456

Pending external setup

  • Giscus comments — need a public GitHub repo for backend
  • GoatCounter analytics — need to register an account
  • Continuous deploy — need to link Netlify to the private repo via dashboard

See CLAUDE.md for the full setup steps and current placeholders.

Setup checklist for new contributors

If you’re a new Claude session or human collaborator landing here:

  1. Read CLAUDE.md in this directory
  2. Read _meta/process.md for the methodology
  3. Check _meta/log.md to see what’s been processed and what’s next
  4. Check _meta/TODO.md for cross-cutting tasks
  5. Pick up the next unprocessed note in the Queue or work on a TODO

What this is not

  • Not a finished site. Many pages are drafts. That’s the point.
  • Not a polished product. The wiki is a working garden.
  • Not Andrew’s only writing. Some essays will continue to live on Substack and elsewhere — this is the source layer that feeds them.
  • Not the only wiki in Fractal OS. There’s also a separate Fractal Wiki for organizational knowledge — that’s a different project.

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