862,404 words in twenty days

The last few weeks have been a fever dream.

I've stayed up past 3AM more nights than I can count. My diet and nutrition went completely out the window.

Miraculously, I kept running. I kept practicing violin. I kept doing my full-time job.

A few things that keep me grounded amid the insanity.

So what is the source of this insanity?

I've been talking to chatbots for years

And I got a lot done.

But there was always a ceiling, and it was always the same one. The context window.

Every conversation started from zero. Every time I wanted to pick up something I'd been working on last week, I had to explain it all over again.

Can't I just... leave the project somewhere and pick up where I left off?

Then ChatGPT told me to install Codex

So I did. (Because when the robot suggests something, obviously I comply immediately and without question.)

And I realized it could edit the files on my computer.

Wait. That sounds scary...right? Or...wait.

I don't actually remember what I was working on that night. I had to go look it up.

Eighteen minutes after I made the folder, the first thing I put in it was every transcript from my YNAB videos — and a stack of prompts I'd written trying to get AI to make more of them.

Which brings us to the first thing I got wrong.

Breakthrough one: I tried to teach it my voice

I knew from vast experience that I'm usually dissatisfied with AI's creative writing. I've never really liked what it hands me.

I wondered if maybe that's a context problem. Maybe it just doesn't know me well enough.

So I exported the transcripts of every video I've made, dumped them in, and asked it to learn how I talk and write me a style guide.

And that's how it started.

(The scripts it makes are still bad, for the record. I haven't cracked that code. That's a story for another post.)

Breakthrough two: the Karpathy method

Here's what you need to know about me: I hate personal knowledge management. At least, I have a complicated relationship with it.

I wrote a whole post about it in January.

So it's taken me a decade of neurotically building and rebuilding... to get back to the conclusion that I should basically just keep a journal.

Why do I need a system for writing down thoughts that I have? Can't I just... write them down?

That was five months and twelve days before I built a vault that now has 785 notes in it.

So either I'm a hypocrite, or something changed.

And I think...something changed. Specifically, the way I framed personal knowledge management (ew, I even hate the term...).

Here's my defense. Read what I was actually complaining about:

I have spent so much time collecting notes from articles and books I've read... that I've completely ignored the most valuable source of information for me... my own personal experience!

I wasn't against systems. I was against collecting other people's stuff instead of my own.

Then I found Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki idea, and it inverted the rule. You don't collect in case. You add what a project needs, when it needs it, and nothing else.

Look what I put in on night one:

My core beliefs. Three style guides. My CV. My career goals.

My own personal experience. The exact thing I'd spent a decade ignoring.

I didn't plan that. I just... started with me.

And everything I've pulled in since showed up because a job demanded it.

On July 4th I read four Webflow articles about navigation bars. Because I was building a navigation bar.

On July 6th I photographed a page out of my violin scale book and fed it in. Because that week's practice needed Bb major, No. 5.

Fifteen sources. Twenty days. Nothing "just in case." Everything for a specific purpose. To solve a specific problem.

Breakthrough three: I wanted to keep track of it all

Very quickly, the pace of new ideas for things I wanted to build or accomplish outpaced my ability to keep up. I knew I needed a system to manage my idea backlog, my programs, and my projects. I won't get into the details here, because that's a post all on its own, but I want to share some of what that system has helped me accomplish so far.

What actually shipped

This website. The old me would have set out to "build a website" and inevitably produced a half-baked, ill-conceived, unfinished thing that depressed me so much I'd abandon it. The new me broke that down into thirteen separate projects. And I finished all of them, from design to build to publish to content migration. It's live at tylersmith.io as my only site of record now. I cut it over from Squarespace, retired the old blog subdomain, redirected every post, submitted a 944-URL sitemap, and cancelled both old services. 257 posts came across. 2009 to 2026. Seventeen years of my writing, moved.

My media log. 624 items — 310 films, 299 books, 15 albums — pulled out of Goodreads and Letterboxd and Album Whale and onto my own site. Not really useful, per se, because the record exists on those platforms, but now it's self-hosted. Feels right.

My violin practice. This is the one I didn't see coming, and it isn't a tech thing at all. The vault helps me run my practice now. I use it to capture what my teacher tells me, create my current practice plan, keep my practice journal, and there are even two shortcuts on my phone that open the right note with a bullet already waiting for me to type as I learn and practice. I photographed a page of my scale book and it went into the wiki. I would not have guessed any of that was automatable.

In all, I've spawned eighteen projects so far. Fifteen of them finished and archived. Three still in flight. Many more to come!

The vault by the numbers

785 notes.

862,404 words.

That's longer than the Bible. It's longer than War and Peace. It's about 80% of all seven Harry Potter books.

In twenty days. 43,120 words a day.

I didn't write all of them, of course. That's the whole point.

(Only about 146,000 of that is transcripts and articles I pulled in. The other 716,499 words are produced by the vault itself or by me directly.)

Twenty days. Zero days off. I wrote something in there every single day.

There are 2,047 links between these notes, pointing at 215 different things. They are not spread evenly. Gives you an idea which projects are seeing the most activity.

The single most linked-to note in the whole vault is this website. By more than double.

46% of it happened between 10PM and 3AM.

My single most productive hour of the day is 10PM.

And the latest file I have ever created was at 2:33 in the morning.

I told you it was 3AM. It's 2:33. I've been rounding up.

You want to know what I was doing at 2:33 in the morning?

Re-titling a video I'd published a month earlier. Not the best use of my time. But don't worry, I'm already adding ideas to my backlog about how to update the system so it's easier to work in small chunks so I can more easily come to a stopping point.

This post is only the beginning

I'm really excited about how this technology is enabling me to produce and build things I've wanted to make for a long time, but have felt unable to do due to lack of time, resources, or skill. I'll be continuing to write about my journey, including a vault tour, and sharing about projects as I finish them. I don't want to get too meta in my main feed, so I'm also considering adding a changelog or release notes type feature to the website where that kind of stuff can live.