Nick Savage

How I Accidentally Built a Runaway AI

A half‑finished coding agent taught me three lessons: tokens are expensive, feedback loops matter, and guardrails aren’t optional

Sep 16 • 

Nick Savage

1

What I Learned Rebuilding Search Three Times

The evolution of Zettelgarden’s search: frontend hacks, brittle SQL, and finally a dedicated engine.

Sep 4

August 2025

Facts, Arguments, Theses: Building AI Knowledge Retrieval on Meaning, Not Slices

Progress notes from Zettelgarden: experimenting with LLM pipelines that embed semantic units - theses, arguments, and facts - instead of raw text chunks

Aug 22 • 

Nick Savage

1

January 2025

When AI Promises Speed but Delivers Debugging Hell

Lessons learned from building Codescribble with a little help (and a lot of frustration) from an AI

Jan 26 • 

Nick Savage

5

The Scenic Route to Software: Code Generation for Non-Traditional Developers

Observations from a self-taught developer building in public

Jan 8 • 

Nick Savage

Beyond RAG: Building a Knowledge Management System That Enhances Rather Than Replaces Thought

Preserving and augmenting human insight in an age of automated knowledge with Zettelgarden

Jan 2 • 

Nick Savage

10

2

December 2024

From Vector Search to Entity Processing: Evolving Zettelgarden's Connection Engine

A deep dive into how Zettelgarden evolved from basic vector search to a sophisticated entity processing system, exploring the challenges and…

Dec 2, 2024 • 

Nick Savage

November 2024

Zettelgarden: Building Your Intelligent External Memory

Adding conversational AI to your personal knowledge management system

Nov 26, 2024 • 

Nick Savage

Retrieval Augmented Generation in Practice: Building Search for Connected Notes

Chunking, reranking, and vector search implementation with LLMs in Zettelgarden

Nov 21, 2024 • 

Nick Savage

October 2024

Zettelgarden and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Building retrieval-augmented generation into a personal information management system

Oct 4, 2024 • 

Nick Savage

1

May 2024

Learning Distributed Systems with MIT and Go

Reflections on a month of hacking away at the Raft protocol with an open course from MIT

May 13, 2024 • 

Nick Savage

May 2023