Knowledge systems
Markdown, search, documents, structured notes, versioning, retrieval, and the problem of keeping information useful after the initial excitement wears off.
- Markdown to PDF Is a Swamp
"Convert this Markdown to a PDF" sounds like a solved problem — a one-liner. It is a swamp: no standard pipeline, a dead-but-ubiquitous engine at its center, and a workflow where you only find out the PDF is wrong after you've made it. I built a tool that doesn't drain the swamp, just hands you an honest map.
- The Backlinks You Draw Yourself
Obsidian and Notion sell 'connected thinking,' but you draw every connection by hand — the graph just displays the links you already typed. I built the tool that finds them for you instead, then spent months perfecting its architecture and never once checked whether it helped me write.
- The Model Has No Memory. That's a Data Problem.
Every model is a stateless brain riding a stateful transcript — close the tab and it forgets the world you built with it. Giving it durable memory isn't a prompting trick; it's an infrastructure problem, and the first thing it teaches you is that facts and stories have to be stored completely differently.
- Weight Isn't Agreement
RAG hands an AI a stack of documents and lets it produce one confident answer — hiding that the sources disagree, that five of them are the same article reposted, that it should have said 'I don't know.' I built an evidence layer around one rule: never give the weight without the fight.
- I Built a Search Engine by Hand
Inverted index, TF-IDF, cosine ranking — before letting myself reach for a library. The two things that stuck weren't the ranking math: a DataFrame is the wrong shape for an index, and my great-looking demo scored 0.01 on the benchmark.
- I Have Four Edit Histories for the Same Photo
Non-destructive photo editing keeps the original untouched and logs your edits separately — event sourcing, basically, for pictures. It's a promise about the original file. It says nothing about whether you can still read the log in ten years.