u/cjrittle1998

I'm building a personal "second brain": a private dashboard plus long-term memory for an AI agent, both reading one shared store. Before I build, I want people who self-host to poke holes in it.

The design:

• Source of truth: plain Markdown files (Obsidian-compatible) + JSON for structured data (tasks, decisions). Lives on a Mac mini at home.
• Derived index: a Python indexer builds a SQLite DB with FTS5 full-text search + sqlite-vec embeddings. The DB is disposable, rebuildable from the Markdown/JSON anytime.
• Serving: FastAPI + HTMX/Jinja2, single process, no JS build, no Docker. Tailscale-only, phone via PWA. Nothing exposed to the public internet.
• AI: Ollama on the mini (local LLM for Q&A/summaries, local embeddings). Zero hosted API calls for private data.
• Sync/backup: private git repo as transport; encrypted replica on a cloud VM.

The point is one brain with two faces: I browse it on the dashboard, the agent reads/writes it through a private API as its memory.

What I'm unsure about: SQLite write contention (single user + one agent, probably fine?), sqlite-vec at 100k+ chunks, Tailscale as the only remote access (lock-in?), and whether a home mini is actually sane as the primary vs a cheap VPS. Also whether I'm overcomplicating it — is there a simpler stack I'm missing for "private Markdown corpus + search + tiny dashboard"?

Tear it apart. What breaks first?