Follow thematic reading trails across a 100-book library
At a glance
Pieter Maes gave Claude Code topic-search tools to connect passages across 100 nonfiction books and published the resulting reading trails. This workflow is listed under reading, personal-knowledge, topic-discovery.
- Agents / tools
- Claude Code, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, SQLite, Custom CLI tools
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What they did
He indexed book passages by topic with Gemini, stored the library in SQLite and exposed command-line tools for semantic search, topic-tree navigation and topic co-occurrence. Claude used those tools to propose themes, select and order excerpts, and add highlights connecting consecutive passages.
How it went
He published browsable trails, including one passing through Steve Jobs, Bad Blood, Zero to One and The True Believer. He reports that letting Claude choose its tool calls produced better results than his earlier pipeline of hand-assembled model contexts.
Worth knowing
Several HN readers challenged the strength of the connections. The trails present proposed interpretations of the passages, with the excerpts available to inspect.