[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I use a home baked system based on obsidian that is essentially just “obsidian but with structured format on top with schemas” and I deploy this in multiple places with ranges of end users. It is more valuable than you think. The intermediary layer is great for capturing intent of design and determining when implementation diverges from that. There will always be a divergence from the intent of a system and how it actually behaves, and the code itself doesn’t capture that. The intermediate layer is lossy, it’s messy, it goes out of date, but it’s highly effective.

It’s not what this person is describing though. A self referential layer like this that’s entirely autonomous does feel completely valueless - because what is it actually solving? Making itself more efficient? The frontier model providers will be here in 3 weeks doing it better than you on that front. The real value is having a system that supports a human coming in and saying “this is how the system should actually behave”, and having the system be reasonably responsive to that.

I feel like a lot of the exercises like op are interesting but ultimately futile. You will not have the money these frontier providers do, and you do not have remotely the amount of information that they do on how to squeeze the most efficiency in how they work. Best bet is to just stick with the vanilla shit until the firehose of innovation slows down to something manageable, because otherwise the abstraction you build is gonna be completely irrelevant in two months

[ctxc]

Interesting, I'd love to know more. Are parts of it public?

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Indeed, I have it open source, but want to preserve my anonymity here. The main gist of it is Quartz as a static site frontend bundle, backed by Decap as an editor, so that non technical users can edit documents. The validation is twofold - frontmatter is validated by a typical yaml validator library, and then I created markdown body validation using some popular markdown AST libraries, so there are two sets of schemas - one for the frontmatter, one for the body, and documents must conform via ci. I ship it with a basic cli that essentially does validation and has a few other utilities. Not really that much magic, maybe 500 lines of code or so in the CLI and another few hundred lines doing validation and the other utilties. It's all in typescript, so I use the same validation in Decap when people do edits.