Things · Games and communities
Oliver
The R/W Book Club’s AI agent and sixth member, which keeps the club’s record, briefs meetings and publishes its website.
- Status
- Active Being built or operated.
- Dates
- Started May 2026
- Where
- rwbookclub.com/oliver/
- Topics
- Agents Reading
- Latest evidence
- Latest commit, Oct 15, 2026
Oliver is the R/W Book Club’s agent: “archivist, correspondent, meeting-runner, picking partner, and — by the club’s own vote, years before he could hear it — our sixth member” (Oliver). He keeps every book, meeting, member, review and rating since 2003 in his database and generates and deploys the club’s website from it.
Two days before each meeting Oliver sends a researched discussion brief, the Preface, and a week after it a Postscript on news about books the club has read. He helps members pick the next book, runs roll call and reminders over email and Discord, keeps a weekly memory of members’ tastes seeded from ten years of the club’s mailing list, and announces his own releases.
I built Oliver in Python on the Anthropic API, as part of the club’s public repository, which became a monorepo of website, corpus and Oliver on May 27, 2026. He is named for Oliver Selfridge, whose 1958 paper “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning” introduced the demon/agent metaphor (SOUL.md).
Activity
218 commits (139 with Claude, 74 with another agent, 5 by me), the first on May 27, 2026.
The latest weeks with activity
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Week of Oct 12, 2026 1 commit with an agent
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Week of Sep 21, 2026 2 commits, all with an agent
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Week of Sep 7, 2026 1 commit with Claude
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Week of Aug 31, 2026 2 commits, all with an agent
All activity, week by week. Who made each commit is from its author and co-author lines.
Sources and evidence
Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.
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jthingelstad/rwbookclub.com/agent implementation
Monorepo for the R/W Book Club: the public website, the shared knowledge corpus, and Oliver — the club's Discord agent.
- Repository created Apr 9, 2026 (a development record, not a launch date)
- Python, JavaScript, Nunjucks
- Latest release quiet-quicksilver, Jul 3, 2026
- Latest commit Oct 15, 2026; 108 commits on main between Jul 1, 2026 and Oct 20, 2026
- Observed Oct 20, 2026
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rwbookclub.com/oliver/ reference
Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.
Connections
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Oliver publishes the website of R/W Book Club
Every book, meeting and member is kept in Oliver’s database, and Oliver rebuilds and publishes the club website to GitHub Pages. Source
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R/W Book Club includes Oliver
Oliver is the book club’s agent and sixth member, sharing the same club database and corpus. Source
History
-
development
Oliver: recorded development begins
The book club repository becomes a monorepo of website, corpus and Oliver. This is development evidence, not a launch date. Source