186 karma · joined March 31, 2017
This is the process that nothing can do for us.
Sanctum is a voice journal, think Obsidian but for voice notes. I am really honing in on data sovereignty, privacy, 1 click to record and self organization of notes / ideas.
While this isn't anything revolutionary, or technically difficult, I do think I've landed on a form factor and stack that is in my opinion not served by current products. So much so that I just simply had to build it myself. Sanctum was born out of an Obsidian plugin that I built and have been maintaining for about 2 years called Scribe and it's been a wonderful way to really hone in on a more full fledged agentic development process for a full stack experience.
The stack is simple
- For transcription I am using AssemblyAI - they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training
- LLM inference is running inside a TEE using redpill.ai, it's slow af but as private as I could find.
- For cloud backup I am using full E2E encryption with Backblaze for storage
- Endpoints and the like are AWS lambdas, DynamoDB for billing storage, Supabase for auth
I (yes, fully me, not AI) have been doing a lot of writing on the process, we are flooded with these sorts of post on HN, but if anyone is interested in reading, check it out! https://www.builtinspace.xyz/blog/begin-with-ethos.Anyway, something I am most definitely curious on is if people are recording their thoughts, what they are using (either a cobbled together solution or a product) and what value they feel they've been getting from it!
I was all in on sandboxes and safehouse for my agents but the moment I got into iOS development it felt like my hand was forced to just run Claude / codex / pi directly on my machine because nothing else could do the dev loop.
It’s been a painful reality for me, I’m going against core pieces of how I feel I should be interacting with agent harnesses and yet, I need to get the work done so
>often harnesses also mention in their system prompt locations of markdown files that the model can consult if the model thinks they might help >that hint alone as part of the system prompt can be strong enough to make the model read in more tokens than would have been necessary
I purposefully do this as I imagine it is useful. In my project I am seeing solid adherence to norms and a deep capacity to iterate on completed features. Essentially for each feature I have the model make a {featureName}.AGENTS.md at the root folder of the feature, where it maintains what is going on.
I am moving between Claude Code and Codex atm, but I began this pattern when pi + kimi 2.6 was my main driver.
My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.
It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.
But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.
I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!
I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.
Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?
We still run into the same issues that this brings about in the first place, AI or no AI. When requirements change will it update both functions? If it is rewriting them because it didn't see it existed in the first place, probably not. And there will likely be slight variations in function / components names, so it wouldn't be a clean grep to make the changes.
It may not impact velocity or stability in the exact moment, but in 6 months or a year - it likely will, the classic trope of tech debt.
I have no solution for this, it's definitely a tricky balance and one that we've been struggling with human written code since the dawn.
On top of that, I actually have it as an Obsidian vault, and I have the llm themselves use Obsidian markdown for the frontmatter and knowledge graph linking. It makes it very easy for me to navigate the data and interact in a way that is deeply enjoyable, and it also helps the model navigate the files.
Honestly, it's been a dream, I have it running in a docker-sandbox with access to a single git repo (not hosted) that I am using for varied things with my business.
Try it out, it's super easy to setup. If you use docker sandbox, you can just follow what is necessary for claude, spin up the sandbox, exit out, exec into it with bash and switch to Pi.
I gave it a beat and then reached over and pushed the button to pop out the remote control for them. It was a cute head smack moment for the Mom and the daughter didn’t know what to do with the remote for a solid few seconds.
This happens to me as well when I’m in a public bathroom without a sensor, and I wave my hands underneath obliviously for a few moments.
Life is funny
The reality is that the money being thrown = the time of humans. I guess compute as well, but in terms of people doing innovation - openly published things are the same thing, minus the money.
If you google an image of it, maybe it’ll make sense
What I appreciate the most about this string of comments (from OP) is that digging into "doing it for fun", hosting on your own machine, wanting simplicity for you as the maintainer and builder. This has been a big focus for me over a number of years, and it leads to things being not efficient, or scalable or even usable by others—but they bring me joy and that is more than enough for most things.
The reality is that there are of course ways to make this more efficient AND it simply doesn't need to be.
Good job on making something that people are clearly interested in, it brought me some joy clicking around and learning some things.
If you want it to be more than just this, of course you'll have to make it faster or have it be a different interface—installable offline typa thing so we can expect a bundle download and be fine with waiting. For example I can see this as a native app being kinda nice.
If you don't want it to be more than this, that's okay too.
Regardless, well done
I also don't know what the "river/awesome philosophy" is, so therefore I don't know what this WM does that makes it different than something like Rectangle for example.
And truth be told, I'm not going to look it up. I am only adding this comment because I'm sure there will be a ton of other people that fall into the same category as me.
Good luck though, super cool to see that you built this in a weekend!
I don't want to deal with the cloud infra for my personal site.
I could, I've done it in corporate, I've done it for my startup 2 years ago. But I'm rusty, I don't know what the latest people are using for configuration, etc.
Because there is 1 click with CF or Vercel and I don't have to think about it—I don't. If they increase their price it likely wouldn't be enough friction for me dust off the rust.
I think this is the relation. I'm not locked in, it's just HTML pages, but I am through my own habit energy, tech changing, and what I want to put effort into, which is not infra and serving my site.
With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel.
Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro.
I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.