Field Notes

Field notes from real builds, not vendor marketing.

The source for fieldnotes.talirezun.com, a public, structured distillation of what I have written, taught and shipped.

I publish narrative essays on Substack, mirrored to Medium. Those are chronological and first person. They answer what happened to me. This is the other axis: topical, durable, and built to be extracted. It answers how something works.

Nothing here is republished from those essays. It is distilled across them and links back.

Take the corpus

The whole thing is a download, and that is deliberate.

File	What it is
/downloads/field-notes-complete.md	Every chapter in one markdown file, with a provenance header
/downloads/field-notes-chapters.zip	One markdown file per chapter. Use this one for ingestion
/<slug>.md	Any single chapter as raw markdown, e.g. /context-engineering.md
/llms.txt	A structured map of the site for models

These are generated at build time from content/chapters/, so they never lag behind the pages. They are gitignored, because a derived artefact in git is a merge conflict waiting to happen.

Into your own second brain

The corpus was written and is maintained in The Curator, my open-source local second brain. It reads documents, writes an interlinked wiki of entities and concepts, and serves that wiki to a frontier model over MCP.

Download the zip, drop the ten files into the Ingest tab, and query your own copy. Full instructions are at /the-curator.

It needs a Google Gemini or an Anthropic API key for ingestion. Gemini has a free tier that covers a one-off run of this size.

⭐ Star The Curator on GitHub

Two licences, because this repo holds two things

• Content (content/**, and everything generated from it): CC BY 4.0. Reuse it, adapt it, feed it to a model, put it in your own second brain. Attribution is the only condition. This is deliberate. The point is for the corpus to spread, and a restrictive licence would fight that.
• Code (src/**, scripts/**, config): MIT.

Attribution, if you want the short form:

Dr. Tali Režun, Field Notes (https://fieldnotes.talirezun.com), CC BY 4.0

Corrections

Found an error? Open an issue or a PR. Corrections are welcome and go straight into the chapter file. Additions are my call.

Running it

Static Astro site. No CMS, no database, no cookies.

npm install
npm run dev

npm run build runs prebuild first (npm lifecycle), which copies the self-hosted fonts out of node_modules and generates the download bundles, then builds to dist/.

content/
  config.ts          Zod schema. The build fails on a violation, by design
  chapters/          One markdown file per chapter, numbered
  pages/             Standalone pages
src/
  lib/               Corpus assembly, chapter splitting, site constants
  layouts/           Base and Chapter, including the provenance rail
  components/
  styles/tokens.css  The palette and the type scale
scripts/prebuild.ts  Fonts and download bundles

If you are an agent working on this repo, read CLAUDE.md first. It is the specification, not a summary.

Elsewhere

talirezun.com · Substack · Medium · LinkedIn · X · GitHub