Posted by pmaze 1/10/2026
I built a system for Claude Code to browse 100 non-fiction books and find interesting connections between them.
I started out with a pipeline in stages, chaining together LLM calls to build up a context of the library. I was mainly getting back the insight that I was baking into the prompts, and the results weren't particularly surprising.
On a whim, I gave CC access to my debug CLI tools and found that it wiped the floor with that approach. It gave actually interesting results and required very little orchestration in comparison.
One of my favourite trail of excerpts goes from Jobs’ reality distortion field to Theranos’ fake demos, to Thiel on startup cults, to Hoffer on mass movement charlatans (https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/useful-lies/). A fun tendency is that Claude kept getting distracted by topics of secrecy, conspiracy, and hidden systems - as if the task itself summoned a Foucault’s Pendulum mindset.
Details:
* The books are picked from HN’s favourites (which I collected before: https://hnbooks.pieterma.es/).
* Chunks are indexed by topic using Gemini Flash Lite. The whole library cost about £10.
* Topics are organised into a tree structure using recursive Leiden partitioning and LLM labels. This gives a high-level sense of the themes.
* There are several ways to browse. The most useful are embedding similarity, topic tree siblings, and topics cooccurring within a chunk window.
* Everything is stored in SQLite and manipulated using a set of CLI tools.
I wrote more about the process here: https://pieterma.es/syntopic-reading-claude/
I’m curious if this way of reading resonates for anyone else - LLM-mediated or not.
Orwelliian motives (sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purposes) are somewhat dated.
The book was really big and it got stuck in "indexing". (Possibly broke the indexer?) But thanks to the CLI integration, it was able to just iteratively grep all the info it needed out of it. I found this very amusing.
Anthropic's article on retrieval emphasizes the importance of keyword search, since they often outperform embeddings depending on the query. Their own approach is a hybrid:
It's like grabbing a half-dozen books off the library shelf, opening to a random page in each, then flit through them, kind of like a "engineering nerd book sample platter".
The visual style of linking phrases from one section to the next looks neat, but the connections don’t seem correct. There’s a link from “fictions” to “internal motives” near the top of the first link and several other links are not really obviously correct.
There's two stages to the linking: first juxtaposing the excerpts, then finding and linking key phrases within them. I find the excerpts themselves often have interesting connections between them, but the key phrases can be a bit out there. The "fictions" to "internal motives" one does gel for me, given the theme of deceiving ourselves about our own motivations.
I really think we all should sync up and talk more. I want to make this bigger.