second-brain

A personal knowledge system built on a video/article extraction pipeline and an LLM-maintained wiki (inspired by the Karpathy LLM Wiki pattern).

What it does

1. Pull — download YouTube videos or fetch web articles
2. Transcribe — extract transcripts via Whisper (videos) or trafilatura (articles)
3. Extract — single-shot Claude call produces structured notes per source
4. Review — web UI to accept or reject extractions
5. Compile — wiki compiler folds accepted extractions into a living Obsidian vault

Quick start

# Install dependencies
uv sync

# Copy and edit config
cp config/settings.toml config/settings.local.toml

# Queue a source
uv run second-brain add https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...

# Run the pipeline
uv run second-brain process

# Review in the web UI
uv run second-brain serve

# Compile to wiki
uv run second-brain compile

Domains

Extractions are tagged by domain so the right prompt template is used:

Domain	Focus
development	Software, programming, systems
content	Content creation, video production
business	Entrepreneurship, marketing, ops
homelab	Self-hosted infra, networking, DevOps

Extractor backends

Two backends, selectable via [extractor].backend in config/settings.toml:

• cli (default) — shells out to claude -p --output-format json --json-schema .... Runs under your Max OAuth subscription, no per-token billing. The wrapper spawns the CLI in a throwaway tempfile.TemporaryDirectory and strips ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN from the env so host CLAUDE.md, hooks, and settings don't leak in, and the subscription is used instead of the API key.
• api — uses the anthropic Python SDK, requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. Install with uv sync --extra api (the SDK is an optional dependency).

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• Either the claude CLI on PATH (default backend) or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (api backend)
• ffmpeg (for Whisper audio extraction)

In-flight work

• Postgres + pgvector migration — SQLite is the current backing store but the project is moving to Travis's Postgres instance. Planning questions live in postgres-migration-planning.md; nothing has been migrated yet.