When people ask me for connections, I share my LinkedIn data and ask them to pick.

This week, three people asked for AI ideas. I shared my local content with AI coding agents and asked them to pick.

STEP 1: Give access to content. I use a Dockerfile and script to isolate coding agents. To give access, I run:

dev.sh -v /home/sanand/code/blog/:/home/sanand/code/blog/:ro \
       -v /home/sanand/code/til:/home/sanand/code/til:ro \
       -v /home/sanand/Dropbox/notes/transcripts:/home/sanand/Dropbox/notes/transcripts:ro

This gives read-only access to my blog, things I learned, transcripts, and I can add more. (My transcripts are private, the rest are public.)

STEP 2: Ask agents to scan content. For example, I ask it to read:

  • Required blog posts related to LLMs /home/sanand/code/blog/ (especially with the category llms)
  • Other relevant transcripts /home/sanand/Dropbox/notes/transcripts (especially extracted AI advice at /home/sanand/Dropbox/notes/transcripts/extracts/ai/)
  • Things I learnt at /home/sanand/code/til/

This makes it explicitly aware of the content and can use it to answer questions.

STEP 3: Help it do better. I often add “Use sub-agents as required”, which reduces the context and lets them run more in parallel. I also point them to post-mortems for tips on scanning content effectively.

STEP 4: Output as JSON. JSON lets me write programs to convert to multiple other formats (e.g. HTML, markdown). I specify the fields I want, how I want them filled, and leave the rest to the agent. Sample output.

This is not a new technique. It’s just context engineering, roughly like:

  • Connecting ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/ to Dropbox/Google Drive/… and asking it to read the content.
  • Enabling web search and asking them to search online.

But I can do this (kind of) safely on my local content and I can also teach it how to scan the content - which is a useful learning.

Next steps:

  1. Add README.md to each directory on how to scan the content effectively.
  2. Think about what content repositories I should add
  3. Explore combining content repositories cleverly (e.g. “Read my blog and apply lessons to my code.”)