One Knowledge Base, Four Surfaces: Pages, Graph, Search Index, and MCP

Originally published on michael-kaminski.io . The Genome of Games publishes the same 1,180 records four different ways, and one command writes all four: node build.js , 0.39 seconds, zero npm dependencies. Out come 1,245 static HTML pages for crawlers, an interactive canvas graph for humans, a 129,037-byte search index for the site's own search box, and a Model Context Protocol server exposing 8 tools to agents. The decision worth copying is the one that sounds like a downgrade. The MCP server does not query the site and does not read the source data. It statically imports a 1.9 MB index that the build wrote. There is exactly one place where slugs, lineage, and adoption edges get joined, so an agent and a crawler cannot come back with different answers. The dataset is an ontology of video game mechanics — 168 mechanics, 618 games, 394 companies, 4,366 recorded links, 1962 to 2025. What the records are about does not matter here. The shape of the problem shows up anywhere a structured knowledge base has to serve both a search engine and a model. Four surfaces, one build, a twelve-fold expansion Six hand-edited JSON files under data/ are the source of truth: the feature ontology, the graph, the prose, the company registry, the site copy, and the verified outbound links. Together they are 1,312,577 bytes. The build turns that into 16,644,215 bytes of generated read surface. A 12.7× expansion, and every byte of it is disposable. Surface Consumer Bytes Per entity 1,245 static HTML pages Crawlers, humans 14,613,203 11,728 / page mcp-index.json → MCP server Agents 1,901,975 1,612 search-index.json The site's own search box 129,037 109 /graph/ canvas Humans exploring lineage data injected at build — The build also emits sitemap.xml with 1,245 entries, llms.txt , robots.txt , and a 404 page. The same run reports 96,843 internal links across those pages. Nothing in that list is authored. Delete the whole output directory and the next build restores it in under half a second.