I Built SelfContext So I Could Stop Re-explaining Myself to AI

In my last article , I mentioned SelfContext as a brainstorming partner. That was the short version. This is the longer one. I built it because I was tired of starting every useful AI conversation from zero. I already had history, goals, preferences, decisions, and a list of ideas I had already rejected. Every new session still asked me to explain myself again, as if none of that existed. Provider memory did not solve it. Chat history did not solve it. A folder of notes did not solve it either. The tools were happy to remember a random detail with great confidence and forget the decision I actually needed. The useful context stayed scattered, hard to inspect, and stuck to whichever tool happened to remember it this week. I wanted context I own . A Context Layer, Not Another Chatbot SelfContext is a local context layer for the AI tool I already use. It is not a chatbot, not another harness, and not a hosted memory product. It is a vault of ordinary Markdown files, plus skills that tell an existing agent how to ingest that context, retrieve it, reason from it, and keep it from rotting. The tagline is the whole product: think with context you own. The technical thesis is simpler than the architecture docs make it sound. Context has a lifecycle. A conversation is temporary. Reasoning is not automatically memory. Only the pieces that will make a future conversation better should survive. I already made a version of this argument for engineering work in Context Is Not Memory, It Needs an Engine . SelfContext is the personal version of that idea, kept small on purpose. Karpathy's Wiki, Pointed at a Person Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki is the pattern underneath this. Raw sources go in. The model compiles an interlinked markdown wiki. You browse it, ask questions against it, and occasionally lint it. The wiki is supposed to compound instead of making the model rediscover the same synthesis on every question. I took that pattern and pointed it at personal context. That change is