Whoami.wiki is a new project built by a software engineer that gathers information from its user, then employs AI to build an interconnected personal Wiki site tying everything together. The author fed it a series of old photographs along with notes he’d taken from his grandmother’s recollections, and then added newer photographs, timelines, online playlists, receipts, FB, Instagram, and Whatsapp entries, and bank transactions. He used Claude to spin up a local Wiki with all of this information and it built out pages of detail on his trips, where he visited, what he ate, and who he met with. It even identified locations in the photos he took.

Powerful stuff, to be sure, and very tempting to play with. I’ve spent a lot of time and a bit of money working on family history, mainly in the realm of photo archiving, but this author has found a whole new way to harness AI to connect hundreds of separate events into a coherent, searchable narrative. However, there’s no way in hell I’d ever give AI access to my personal data on this level.

On a separate note, I’ve been using Codex to help me with several different projects, and it’s been extremely useful. The first thing I had it do was build a Perl script to scrub excess HTML from an Indesign export so that it could be used in my company’s CMS—automating the process of publishing research products on our website. With some small caveats, it worked exceptionally well. The second thing I had it do was build a simple web page which pulls in my work and personal calendar information for the day, a local weather report, and the top five news articles from the AP and CNN feeds into a responsive page layout. This way I can pull up the important stuff for the day before I drag my old bones out of bed.