The AI gardener
Most digital gardens die the same way: the gardener stops tending them. Writing, linking and pruning notes by hand is real work, and life is a stream.
The idea I'm testing: let the stream feed the garden automatically. Every day, a lot flows into my Obsidian vault: notes, documents, AI sessions, a daily journal. An AI agent compresses that stream into the garden: a summary, a timeline, projects, a graph of what I know. My public page at caldera.social rebuilds itself from the vault every few hours.
Three rules make it safe:
- Opt in, note by note. Nothing in the vault is public unless I plant it in the garden.
- Private by construction. Other people's names, meetings, places and contact details are filtered out in code, not just by asking the AI nicely.
- Signed. Every published note is hashed and listed in a manifest signed with my own key, so anyone can check who wrote it and when.
The next step is connecting gardens to each other: link to a friend's note, and they see the link back on theirs. That is the part of the garden idea that never shipped. More in Gardens and streams.