06.11.2025: Structuring the System: How the Archive Will Work

June 11, 2025, was the day AutonomousMatt became more than an experiment—it became a creative responsibility. What began as a quick way to query my archive through GPT revealed a deeper, more philosophical challenge: How do you turn a life’s work into a responsive system without losing its soul?

This was the day I began laying the mental and structural groundwork for that answer. Below is a complete breakdown of everything that took place.

🧠 Vision Shift

1. Reframed the Project as an Interface to Self

Before June 11, AutonomousMatt was a clever assistant built to answer user queries from a text archive. On this day, the framing changed: it became about building a reflexive tool—one that let me talk to past versions of myself, in public.

The question was no longer: “Can it answer?”
It became: “Can it remember meaningfully, and speak with intent?”

📦 Content Migration Prep

2. Began Compiling Source Content for Conversion

I spent most of June 11 pulling long-form pieces from across my portfolio:

• ArchivalMatt (historical and academic pieces)

• ArtificialMatt (AI, ethics, and speculative design)

• AnthologyMatt (creative nonfiction and essays)

• ArclightMatt (film and media analysis)

I created a raw list of ~40 articles to eventually format, tag, and ingest. The question I asked with each piece: Does this still speak for me? If not, it didn’t make the cut.

🧰 First Attempts at Structural Schema

3. Outlined a Standard Text File Format

While not yet implemented in code, I mocked up what a good .txt structure would look like for AI context ingestion. This included:

txt

CopyEdit

--- title: [Full Title] author: Matthew Shadbolt date: [Published Date] summary: [1–2 sentence abstract] key insight: [Single idea the piece delivers] source: [Canonical URL] --- [Full text below...]

This wasn’t just metadata—it was about anchoring the voice. I wanted the AI to know what each piece meant, not just what it said.

4. Started Sketching Keyword Maps

June 11 was when the first rough keyword clusters were drafted—handwritten at this point, not yet coded.

Examples:

• Gaming addiction, grind, MMO, reward loops → Destiny essay

• Queer cinema, illness, voiceover, absence → Derek Jarman’s Blue

• Teenage isolation, suburban decay, dream logic → The Virgin Suicides

This mental mapping helped seed what would become the live keywordMap logic on June 12–14.

🎛️ Interface Concepting

5. Imagined the Ideal Output Format

I mocked up a few UI sketches (on paper) for what I wanted the experience to feel like:

• Prompt as headline

• Answer as reflective, essayistic prose

• Clear citation to file and source

• Optional ‘view full article’ button

I wasn’t building a chatbot—I was building a public-facing memory layer, where each answer was evidence-backed and linkable.

6. Defined the Role of GPT

Rather than treat GPT as the all-knowing oracle, I decided its role in AutonomousMatt would be:

• Synthesizer

• Reflector

• Interrogator

It would not invent or speculate unless prompted. Its job was to stand in for me—but with the benefit of distance, language modeling, and the ability to braid past insights into new responses.

⚠️ Challenges Revealed

7. Confronted File Length and Chunking Problem

Many essays were long—2,000+ words. GPT works best with well-structured, thematic chunks. June 11 surfaced this tension for the first time:

• How will it know what to pull?

• Should I pre-segment long pieces by theme or section?

• What happens when a single article touches on five ideas?

This led to an early realization that smart chunking and future vector embedding would likely be required.

💡 Philosophical Breakthroughs

8. Wrote the First Draft of the Mission

Buried in a notebook somewhere on June 11 is this note:

AutonomousMatt is not about answering questions. It’s about inviting dialogue with who I was—and still am. A system of reflection, not just reaction.

This became the ethos behind the design decisions that followed.

🚧 What Didn’t Happen (Yet)

• No files were uploaded

• No GPT responses yet rendered

• No UI was visible to users

But it didn’t matter. June 11 was the conceptual launch day—when intention overtook curiosity.

✍️ Closing Thought

June 11 wasn’t about code. It was about conscience—about deciding what it means to build something that remembers you, responds like you, and maybe even grows with you.

The real archive isn’t the files.
It’s the decisions behind them.

—Matt

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