A few days ago I came across a Karpathy gist. The idea was simple: take everything you’ve ever written, turn it into context for a language model, let people have a real conversation with my body of work. It’s like an on demand personal wiki that can be queried in natural language.

I closed the tab. Made coffee. Then opened it again.

I’ve been writing on this blog since 2006. That’s more than 1,400 posts and over 1,000,000 words — productivity frameworks, nomad years, ultramarathons, iOS apps, habits, money, relationships, mindset. Most of it has faded from view, essentially invisible. I have posts from 2014 that I still think are the best things I ever wrote. Nobody finds them. I don’t link to them often enough – and I confess I don’t even think about some of them anymore. They just sit there, accumulating digital dust.

That felt like a waste. And the Karpathy gist gave me an idea.

So I Built the DragosRoua.com On-Demand, Conversational Wiki

I converted all 1,400+ posts into a compact wiki — title, slug, date, categories, a short summary. That wiki lives in a Cloudflare Worker. When you ask a question, the worker does a keyword search across the whole archive, picks the most relevant entries, and passes them as context to a language model. The model answers as it were me, with links back to the actual posts it’s drawing from.

No fancy vector database or fine-tuning or embeddings. Just a flat text file and a decent search function. The whole thing streams at the edge and costs fractions of a cent per conversation. Yes, it still costs me, because I chose to have a decent model taking care of this. It’s my work, after all.

There’s a small button at the bottom right of every page on this site. It has the familiar hat icon on it. Tap it, and type anything in the chat box. “What do you think about building habits?” “Which of your apps should I try first?” “What did living as a nomad actually teach you?” It’ll answer from the real posts, with links to go deeper if you want.

I’ve been testing it for a few hours today. It’s a strange experience, watching it pull up something I wrote in 2011 that’s directly relevant to a question I’d answer the same way today. Twenty years of thinking, suddenly navigable.

What’s even more mind boggling is that you’ll get an accurate, comprehensive and useful answer from my writings, in a personal, conversational tone, without me even being there. I might enjoy a tasty meal cooked by my wife, play with my son or explore growing coffee in Buon Ma Thuot – but you will still get the real, authentic me.

Extra Use Case

Building the wiki had an unexpected side effect. Going through the archive to validate the data, I kept stopping to re-read things. Especially the 2014 – 2018 posts. That was a specific period — It was the peak of my blogging years, with many topics explored and no shortage of life-changing experiences. I was writing without any real audience expectations. Raw in a way I’m not sure I’ve matched since.

I’m going back to thirty of those posts. For each one I’m going to write a “then and now” — what I thought at the time, and where I actually stand a decade later. Some of it will be confirmation. Some of it will be embarrassing. Either way it’ll be honest.

More on that soon.

For now — go ask me something.