Stop re-explaining yourself to every blank page

I didn’t set out to build a website. I set out to get my professional life organized in one place, and the website you’re reading grew out of that.

Here’s the problem I kept running into. Everything worth remembering about your working life lands somewhere different. Slides from a talk, a resume from two jobs ago, notes on a project that shipped, an email you’d want to quote someday. It piles up across documents and platforms, and when it’s time to produce something that represents you (a job application, an email that matters, a post like this one), you end up digging through all of it, trying to remember your own details and hoping you tell the story the same way twice. I was redoing my portfolio when it clicked that the site wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was pulling together years of professional details, and the preferences about how I tell them, into something I could actually draw from.

So I built self.kb, a knowledge base of yourself. Mine holds my professional record, every job, project, and paper. It holds how I want to be positioned, how I write, and the tools I work with. Anything worth remembering goes in, and AI agents help organize it so nothing gets lost or buried.

The part I didn’t expect to enjoy is that the repo is curious about me. Agents ask the questions I wouldn’t think to ask myself, then file the answers where they belong. One of the first things they asked was what I want people to think when my name comes up. Over time that curiosity builds up a picture of how I actually want to come across, which is the exact thing I could never keep straight on my own. There’s one rule that keeps it all trustworthy. Nothing goes in as a fact unless it came from me.

The payoff is an assistant that actually knows you. When I need to write an email that matters, tailor a job application, or put together a LinkedIn post, I ask an agent to write it with me, and it draws on everything in the brain. It gets the facts right, and just as important, it gets the tone right, because how I want to come across is stored in there too. My resume regenerates from the same pool. I’ve stopped re-explaining myself to every blank page.

That’s really what this website is. It’s the first whole piece of software to come out of self.kb. The story pages, the project list, the resume you can download, all of it is drawn from the brain, and when I ship something new, I describe it once and every page that should know about it finds out.

The framework turned out to be the reusable part, so I stripped my data out and published it as self.kb-template. It comes with the question banks and the onboarding interview, so an agent can start building your knowledge base from a blank slate. If you’ve ever wished the AI you write with actually sounded like you, this is my best answer to that. It’s yours to fork.

I’ll be writing here about what I’m building and what I’m learning along the way. There’s an RSS feed if you’d like to follow along. Having a database that knows you this well is a little strange. I recommend it.