How this knowledge base works

Four layers

Notes are short, linked pages, one per concept, lab, model, or open question. They are allowed to be incomplete and they say so. Each carries a growth stage:

• Seed: a first pass, often written to fill a gap an essay exposed.
• Growing: load-bearing in at least one published essay and still being extended.
• Evergreen: stable; revised only for corrections.

Notes about fast-moving subjects (frontier AI labs, hardware) also carry a last reviewed date and a confidence level. A note that has not been reviewed in four months is flagged on its page.

Essays are finished, dated pieces. They do not change after publication except for corrections and marked revisions. Every essay's page ends with a "Built from" panel listing the notes it draws on. The essay is one path through the notes, not a separate body of knowledge.

Tracks are ordered reading paths that alternate essays and notes. Each track says where it is heading and where it currently stops.

Prompts are reverse-engineered instructions that, given the linked notes, would produce something close to a given essay. They are published so the method is inspectable: what the notes contain versus what the author added.

Links

Links between notes and essays are written in the text as double-bracket wiki links. The site resolves them at build time, computes backlinks ("Referenced by", "Appears in"), and draws the graph view from them. A link to a note that does not exist yet renders as a dashed underline. That is deliberate: it marks a gap.

How new material gets in

Raw notes, reading, and half-formed ideas are handed to a language model with one job: decide whether the material is substantial enough to be its own note or should enrich an existing one, then propose the change as a diff for review. Nothing is written to the knowledge base without a human reading the diff. After an essay is published, the same process runs in reverse: concepts the essay used without a note become seeds, notes the essay leaned on are promoted from seed to growing, and links are added in both directions.

Why it is built this way

A digital garden's failure mode is a pile of notes no one can navigate and no one trusts. The stage labels handle trust. The links, backlinks, and tracks handle navigation. The essays give the notes a reason to exist. The prompts make the whole thing reproducible.