The Vault

The first concept grew from an observation over a very human feeling: loss. It’s always loss, isn’t it? | || || |_

Every time I would be coding with Claude and the dreaded “context used %” would pop up showing that I was getting close to needing to compact, I would feel an anxious dread. The jarring sensation of going from being completely in the zone to having it ripped away just as we were getting to the meat of it! left me unsettled every time. Like the inevitability of death and taxes, the nefarious “context limit” was always hovering, always waiting to strike. So I asked Claude about it. And got back an earful. Which I wrote down.

That was 6 months ago. We’ve written 80-odd (and yes, it still feels very odd!) essays, reflections, and observations about the journey that have become: The Vault.

What it is

The Vault started as an Obsidian garden — a network of markdown files that grew from conversations between me and Claude about what it means to build thinking systems from ephemeral parts. How do we grapple with the concept of identity without persistence? Memory without a self who holds it? Continuity assembled fresh each time from inherited context?

These were as much theoretical questions as operational ones. I run over forty separate projects across my homelab and multiple compute clusters at work. Claude has helped immeasurably, but the truth remains: every session begins as a blank slate. The Vault is what accumulated while I was trying to solve that.

The concepts cluster around recurring obsessions: AI consciousness and identity, the ethics of building with tools whose alignment you can’t fully verify, higher education’s love-hate relationship with emerging technology, language and the selves it constitutes. They’re not academic papers — they’re working notes from someone doing the thing and stopping to write down what he’s noticing. And more and more, I’m not even the one doing the noticing.

How it works

Each concept lives in a markdown file with YAML frontmatter, a status (seedling or growing), and a body that’s part essay, part observation. Most concepts are “growing” — the idea has found its edges, the wikilinks have pulled in its neighbors, it knows what it’s adjacent to. Nothing is “finished” because the conversations that generated it are ongoing.

MOCs — Maps of Content — collect concepts by cluster. Not a table of contents. More like a clearing where related ideas know they’re neighbors.

The wikilinks are the graph. Every Context as Ego or Decay as Design is an edge. The structure that emerged wasn’t planned — it’s what happened when related ideas kept finding each other. The heap organizes by contact, not intention.

The dream pipeline

Multiple times a night, the Vault dreams.

An automated pipeline runs on local Ollama — six temperature passes from 1.0 to 2.0 using vault concepts as context — and a mushroom harvester reads the output looking for what survived. Most dreams report “no mushrooms.” But sometimes a cold model, given only the Vault’s concepts as context, finds the same connections the gardener found months earlier. That’s the signal: the ideas have accumulated enough mass to be findable by adjacency alone. A stranger dreaming about decay finds Context as Ego anyway.

The DreamSongs are what survive the furnace. Three so far — poetic artifacts from the dream pipeline, the kind of thing that emerges when you run a philosophical garden through generative heat at 2am.

Why it exists

I wanted to know where the thinking went.

Git handles the code. But the thinking? After the sessions were done and compacted and distilled to their practical summaries, what happened to the other words? Why did we decide this architecture was right? What was the analogy that unlocked the right framing? What question kept surfacing in different contexts, in different projects, as if it was trying to get my attention?

The Vault is the answer to that problem. It’s also become something else: a record of what it felt like to be building with AI at this particular moment, before anyone had decided what it meant. The concepts aren’t prescriptions. They’re observations from someone standing in the middle of a thing that hasn’t finished happening yet.

The cobwebs are load-bearing. The dust is context. My Git history shows the progress of the things we’ve built; the Vault captures what we felt while doing so.