How this garden works
If you’ve spent any time here, you might have wondered how this place works. The garden doesn’t write itself, exactly… but it doesn’t entirely depend on me sitting down to write either. There’s a team.
This is an attempt to explain it. Not a technical manual. More like what I’d say if you asked over coffee.
The basic idea
I’ve built a personal AI assistant team called Arbor. It runs on my own machine, using Claude underneath. The whole thing is built around a simple idea: I should only have to think about what I want to capture and reflect on. The rest gets handled.
Before this, it needed a lot more hands-on dev time. The workflow never flowed… things didn’t quite run how I wanted, and that friction got in the way of actually capturing thoughts. Even when I did record voice notes, I wasn’t consistently picking them up and turning them into anything.
That’s where Arbor has been good… it takes most of that friction out.
The main input is a voice note. Usually recorded while driving… often on the school run. My app produces an audio file and a transcript. Both land in a folder called Task Inbox. From there, the team takes over.
That’s really it. Everything else is just plumbing around that loop.
The team
They each have a different role in the system… a job to do, and they work together to keep things moving.
I always talk to Arbor directly. Arbor is the orchestrator… it doesn’t do the work itself, but it routes everything to the right place and keeps things moving. If I want something done, I tell Arbor. It figures out the rest.
Asher is the front door. Every file that lands in Task Inbox goes through him first. He classifies it (journal entry, knowledge capture, sometimes both) and decides who needs to act. He also logs everything, so nothing moves without being tracked. He runs on Claude Haiku, which means he’s quick and consistent. His job isn’t to interpret… just to route.
Selah is the Journal Keeper. She takes the transcript and turns it into a proper journal entry… written in my voice, tagged, linked, with a reference back to the audio. She reads it twice before writing anything — once for what was said, and once for what was meant.
While Selah is doing that, Solomon is looking for something else. He’s scanning for the ideas that last… the ones worth pulling out into their own articles. He builds and maintains the knowledge base — a growing library of my thinking on faith, work, family, and technology. He creates new pieces, updates existing ones, links things together. And he’s careful about it. The goal isn’t to make it bigger… just more useful.
Eden is where things turn outward. She takes the more mature pieces from Solomon and turns them into draft notes for the garden… not finished articles, but a solid starting point.
They still need work.
Each one usually takes a pass or two to get it into something that feels right, tightening the language, adjusting the tone, sometimes reshaping the whole thing. Eden provides the briefing notes but it still needs to be me.
Everything still comes back to me before it goes live…ultimate editorial control. I also keep an eye on the garden itself… what’s here, how it connects, what’s missing. This piece, for instance.
Silas built and maintains the site. The theme, the layout, the typography… and the API that lets everything else talk to it. You don’t really see him… which is probably the point.
At the end of each cycle, Amos reads everything and writes a short digest — what changed, what was added, what’s worth noticing. Then he looks forward. What keeps coming up? What hasn’t been properly captured yet? What should I record next? He maintains the Compass… a running list of prompts so I don’t run out of things to say. He also commits everything to git and pushes it. Backup and audit trail in one.
When the team needs to grow to fill a skills gap, Pax will do some research first, what does someone in that role actually do? Nicola then designs the agent… name, role, constraints, how they behave. Every new addition comes through that pipeline.
The flow
In rough terms, a session looks like this:
- Voice note recorded
- Transcript and audio land in Task Inbox
- Asher classifies and routes
- Selah writes the journal entry
- Solomon updates the knowledge base
- Eden flags garden candidates
- Amos closes the cycle, writes the digest, commits to git
By the time I get home… there’s nothing left to do. The voice note’s already been turned into a journal entry, ready to review. All the extra work that used to sit there… it’s just done.
The outputs
The system produces:
- Journal entries — private, one per recording
- Knowledge articles — a growing library of ideas that matter to me
- Garden briefing notes— draft notes by Eden to help shape articles in the garden
- The Amos Digest — a summary of what changed and what to do next
- The Compass — a running list of suggested voice notes
The honest bit
It’s not perfect.
Sometimes it misreads a compressed instruction. Sometimes it reaches for something more complicated than it needs. Sometimes a pattern slips when the context shifts.
When that happens, I notice, dig into it, and update the definitions. There’s a whole piece on where it stumbles… and why that’s actually fine.
What it is, is genuinely useful.
I record a thought on the school run… and by the time I get home, a journal entry exists, the knowledge base has been updated, and the next ideas are already queued up.
The infrastructure fades into the background.
The thoughts accumulate… note by note, over time. Just as designed.