Show HN: A seed prompt that bootstraps a custom knowledge-base system

2 points

22 days ago

So I've been working on a few projects with LLM assistance and I've been slowly building up a knowledge base for that project. It started as a series of chats with various LLMs that I copied into CC to organise as markdown, that I could query, and keep building up via Claude Code or Cowork.

It got bigger and it became a pain to dig through directories of markdown so then I asked CC to build a python script to convert the md folder into browsable html. I found it really useful in terms of both being able to browse the html and also being able to add to it and interrogate it via agent.

Then I decided to start using it for other topics/projects so I tried creating a seed prompt that would recreate my whole system from a single prompt. And it works and I'm finding it great to use for those projects too. It's totally flexible and you change whatever you want about it by just telling it.

Also it's really cool that we can now build our own personal easily customisable SaaS from a single prompt.

*Please note* that the prompt instructs your agent to build a python script that creates a static html site from the markdown. It does ask permission first (well it's supposed to). Look at Phase 3 in the markdown file to see these instructions; it's only 10 lines of prompt and easy to follow. Don't trust unknown prompts without reading them!!!

I've only tried this with Opus 4.7 but it should work just as well with 5.5 and I'm sure other models too. I've not tried it with OpenClaw yet but will do soon. To make the most of it in OpenClaw the seed prompt would probably need to change a bit.

I don't recommend installing directly this into an existing project folder. Please only install in a fresh directory, I have no idea what it would do if there were existing files in the folder but you might not be happy about it. It would probably be sensible but you never know.

If you want it to access a folder with a coding project, clone your repo there later. You don't want to have your main coding agent get it's context memory polluted by managing this system.

To install simply paste the prompt into a new empty cowork project or an empty directory using Claude Code. Then let it onboard you. If you don't like the onboarding path then tell it what you want and it should hopefully adapt itself.

Anyway thanks for reading; hope it's useful or interesting.

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