The archivist
One searchable memory of everything said and decided, and it always shows where an answer came from.
search › what did we decide about the fence
“Go with cedar, not vinyl. Get the second quote first.”
chat thread · Oct 3 · line 2,114
search › when did we last service the car
NO HITS
Not in the archive is not the same as “it didn't happen”.
Sample with invented data. The real one looks the same.
What it does
- When I ask about the past, the assistant searches this archive first and answers with a pointer to the exact source line.
- When nothing matches, it says "no hits", never "it didn't happen".
- Every night it reads only what is new from each source and adds it.
- Every Sunday it writes a roll-up: what's new, what keeps coming back, what went quiet, and it resurfaces at most one old item that connects to something live.
How it works
1 · Hears
Importers read each source into a local full-text index. The index holds pointers, not copies; raw files are never changed.
2 · Thinks
Search is plain keyword ranking. A format alarm fires if a source that used to parse suddenly yields zero rows.
3 · Does
Answers cite file and line. Weekly roll-ups use a cheap model to read and a strong one to combine.
What broke
Three duplicate tasks
Its first "commitments" pass read my to-do list the wrong way, saw nothing open, and filed three tasks that already existed. Now it checks later evidence before filing anything.
By the numbers
- ~318k
- searchable lines
- 6
- kinds of source
- 1
- old item resurfaced a week, at most
The call that mattered
No hits is not success. "Not in the archive" is never "it didn't happen".
Built with
SQLite full-text search · Claude Sonnet + Opus (weekly) · Node.js