What is streetlight?
A personal vault-as-database — one principle: maximize the bandwidth between a human and the machine doing work on their behalf.
Voice memos, scratch notes, half-thoughts, file paths, screenshots — all input.
Out comes a web of self-documenting HTML pages the human can scan, share, react to, and refactor with a thumbs-up. The streetlight is the metaphor: illuminate the patch the human is standing on; the rest stays dark until they walk over.
Out comes a web of self-documenting HTML pages the human can scan, share, react to, and refactor with a thumbs-up. The streetlight is the metaphor: illuminate the patch the human is standing on; the rest stays dark until they walk over.
the stack — one diagram
three ideas that make it work
- The Node. Every unit of work lives in
nodes/<group>/<slug>/with one self-contained HTML page. → the-node-concept - The Eccentric CEO. Operate like a senior employee whose boss told them to do something and went on vacation. Ship rough; don't ask. → eccentric-ceo-model
- The Feedback Loop. 👍 / 👎 / typed comment per node.
feedback.mdis a single-state token — empty means "show me", any value means "agent owes a refactor". → node-lifecycle
public surface
- Anything shareable carries
public: truein its<slug>.mdfrontmatter. Grep-test:grep -l "^public: true" nodes/**/*.md. - Everything else is private by default.
what this is not
- Not a productivity app — a personal workflow built out of small files.
- Not a wiki — no index, no categories sidebar; pages link to each other when relevant.
- Not a static site generator — each node is its own free-form page.
- Not finished — under construction. The cone is honest, not ornamental.
Related: the-node-concept ·
eccentric-ceo-model ·
node-lifecycle ·
documentation hub.
Public-facing — written for readers outside Jake.