Things I’ve built.

Things · Publishing

Thingy

An AI librarian that answers questions about everything I have published, with citations back to the original posts and issues.

Ask the archive, get the sources.

Status
Active Being built or operated.
Dates
Started May 7, 2026 (Launched May 2026)
Where
thingy.thingelstad.com/
Topics
Agents MCP The open web Archives
Page views
1,317 in the twelve months to Sep 30, 2026 2025-10: 02025-11: 02025-12: 02026-01: 02026-02: 02026-03: 02026-04: 02026-05: 02026-06: 6702026-07: 692026-08: 392026-09: 539
Latest evidence
Latest commit, Oct 23, 2026
The front page of thingy.thingelstad.com on Oct 20, 2026
thingy.thingelstad.com on Oct 20, 2026. The collector captures the front page once a month.

Thingy is an AI librarian for my public archive. You ask it a question, such as when I first wrote about Ethereum or what I was reading in 2019, and it finds the posts and issues that answer it, quotes them, and links to the originals. It knows only what I have published. Weekly Thing subscribers sign in with their email, and Supporting Members get larger daily budgets.

I previewed it in Weekly Thing 346 and launched it with the new Weekly Thing website on May 7, 2026. A month later, Thingy Evolved gave it its own site and three archives to search, the newsletter, the blog, and the podcast, along with saved conversations, curiosity maps, voice input, and memory. In September I added photos and shared conversations and called it complete. In October it got a new design, with Claude Sonnet for subscribers and Claude Opus for Supporting Members.

Behind Thingy is Librarian, a private archive API with no front end of its own. It holds working copies of every Weekly Thing issue, the blog posts pulled from Micro.blog, and the Another Thing episodes with their transcripts, and it builds the search indexes Thingy answers from. Its repository began as Studio, my earlier publishing system. When publishing moved to WT Builder, what was left became Librarian. It also indexes this registry of things I have built.

The same tools Thingy uses are offered as an MCP server at librarian.thingelstad.com/mcp. Weekly Thing subscribers can connect Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI to it and sign in with their email, with no password. The AI can then search the newsletter, blog, links, photos, and podcast, and link back to each source it uses. As described on Thingy’s about page, an AI agent spent eight review rounds trying to break the tools when the MCP server launched, and what it found shaped how matching works.

Since Weekly Thing 350, Thingy also writes two sections of each issue: Supporting Membership and Echoes, which connects the week’s topics to earlier issues.

The build

  • A static React app built on assistant-ui, served from a private S3 bucket behind CloudFront.
  • It calls Librarian, its private archive API, streams answers over server-sent events, and renders citations and inline photos.
  • Librarian's Python corpus pipeline builds chunked, embedded indexes of every source, and a Node API on AWS Lambda answers from them.
  • Retrieval is hybrid. TF-IDF lexical search and semantic embeddings are fused with reciprocal-rank fusion, then reranked.
  • An agent loop running Claude on Amazon Bedrock plans tool calls, gathers evidence, and writes cited answers.
  • The same tools are published as an MCP server with OAuth 2.1 sign-in, and a suite of more than 850 fixtures runs on every deploy.
  • Sign-in is by email, and the session lives in an HttpOnly cookie.
  • While a reader is signed in, the chat page also offers the archive tools to agents in the browser through WebMCP, in beta.

React assistant-ui Python Node AWS Lambda Amazon Bedrock MCP Amazon S3 Amazon CloudFront

About Thingy

Activity

1,428 commits (921 with Claude, 194 with another agent, 313 by me), the first on Apr 7, 2026.

The latest weeks with activity

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.

2025-11: 02025-12: 02026-01: 02026-02: 02026-03: 02026-04: 372026-05: 3832026-06: 3582026-07: 762026-08: 972026-09: 2192026-10: 258 Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.

Connections

Connections of Thingypublishes a catalog forwas succeeded byanswers fromanswers fromanswers fromindexesreceives issues fromThingyThings I’ve builtWeekly Thing GPTWeekly ThingJamie Thingelstad blogAnother ThingWT Builder

  • Thingy answers from Weekly Thing

    Thingy launched with the new Weekly Thing website in May 2026 and answers from every issue of the newsletter. Source

  • Thingy answers from Jamie Thingelstad blog

    In June 2026 I built a semantic archive of my blog so Thingy could search it alongside the newsletter. Source

  • Thingy answers from Another Thing

    Thingy searches the Another Thing podcast and its transcripts. Source

  • Thingy indexes Things I’ve built

    Librarian snapshots the registry’s things.json into the Weekly Thing corpus, so Thingy and MCP clients can answer questions about my projects (sources thing-<id> and thing-index). Source

  • Thingy receives issues from WT Builder

    After each issue publishes, WT Builder commits the issue text into the Librarian repository so Thingy can retrieve and cite it. Source

  • Things I’ve built publishes a catalog for Thingy

    The registry is published as things.json and llms.txt so Thingy can answer questions about my projects without this site running a model. Source

  • Weekly Thing GPT was succeeded by Thingy

    When Thingy launched in May 2026, I compared the two. The GPT “was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!” Source

Related

Weekly Thing Jamie Thingelstad blog Another Thing

History

  1. milestone Thingy called complete

    I call Thingy complete after adding photos and shared conversations. Source

  2. milestone Thingy Evolved

    Thingy moves to its own site and learns my blog and Another Thing as well as the Weekly Thing. Source

  3. development Thingy: recorded development begins

    The earliest commit in this repository is a development record; the project or idea may predate it. Source

  4. launch New Weekly Thing site and Thingy

    I build a new Weekly Thing website that puts all nine years and 345 issues of the archive on show, with Thingy as its librarian. Source

  5. development Librarian: recorded development begins

    The earliest commit in Librarian, the archive API behind Thingy, is a development record; the project or idea may predate it. Source