B brandongalbraith

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

See more of my writing here. Also check out Devin

In this post, I'll start from scratch and build up to OpenClaw's architecture step by step, showing how you could have invented it yourself from first principles, using nothing but a messaging API, an LLM, and the desire to make AI actually useful outside the chat window.

End goal: understand how persistent AI assistants work, so you can build your own (or become an OpenClaw power user).

First, let's establish the problem

When you use ChatGPT or Claude in a browser, there are several limitations:

Slop

This collection is limited to only include the reports that were submitted as security vulnerabilities to the curl bug-bounty program on Hackerone.

Several other issues not included here are highly suspcious as well.

Reports

[Critical] Curl CVE-2023-38545 vulnerability code changes are disclosed on the internet. #2199174

Extracting financial disclosure reports and police blotter narratives using OpenAI's Structured Output

tl;dr this demo shows how to call OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini model, provide it with URL of a screenshot of a document, and extract data that follows a schema you define. The results are pretty solid even with little effort in defining the data — and no effort doing data prep. OpenAI's API could be a cost-efficient tool for large scale data gathering projects involving public documents.

OpenAI announced Structured Outputs for its API, a feature that allows users to specify the fields and schema of extracted data, and guarantees that the JSON output will follow that specification.

For example, given a Congressional financial disclosure report, with assets defined in a table like this:

Hacking the Rectangular Starlink Dishy Cable

These are are some notes I put together on butchering the rectangular dishy cable.

FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES AT YOUR OWN RISK. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE OR INJURY YOU SUSTAIN FROM FOLLOWING OR NOT FOLLOWING THESE GUIDELINES.

Programming as Theory Building

Peter Naur

Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building" argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	# listgitfiles.sh
	# List raw GitHub URLs for files in a repo or subfolder, filtered by extensions.
	# Full README is embedded and printed only with: listgitfiles.sh -h\|--help

	set -euo pipefail

	# ------------------------- Minimal Help (usage) -------------------------
	print_min_help() {
	cat <<'USAGE'

	// ==UserScript==
	// @name GoodCloud Dynamic Map
	// @namespace https://www.steveinnovates.com
	// @version 2025-07-24
	// @description Displays a dynamic map of your bounded devices
	// @author Steve Oziel
	// @match https://www.goodcloud.xyz/
	// @icon https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=goodcloud.xyz
	// @grant none
	// @downloadURL https://gist.github.com/gmoz22/3daa61753f27562dd7af460cb8a12eb6

	function transform(clip) {
	const pathRegex = /^[a-z]+:\/\/[^:\/]+(:[0-9]+)?\/(.?)(\/[0-9]+)?(\?.)?$/
	const uriPath = clip.text.replace(pathRegex, '$2');
	const spotifyUri = "spotify:" + uriPath.replaceAll('/', ':')
	return spotifyUri;
	}

	FROM hayd/alpine-deno:1.10.1
	WORKDIR /src/app

	ADD deps.ts ./
	RUN ["deno", "cache", "deps.ts"]

	ADD *.ts ./
	RUN ["deno", "cache", "mod.ts"]

	ENTRYPOINT ["deno", "run", "--unstable", "--allow-net", "--allow-hrtime", "--allow-env", "--cached-only", "--no-check", "mod.ts"]