chotu: the seed
A two-day script for saving thoughts into a database. The first time the idea touched code.
Alter began as a script called chotu: “little one” in Hindi. Two evenings of work, February 2025: a little chatbot that remembered what you’d told it. You typed, it replied, and everything was kept so it wouldn’t forget between visits (a Streamlit screen, a small Python backend, OpenAI for the replies, a SQLite file for the memory: eight commits, and actually deployed).
What it was. The first, crudest version of an itch I’d had for a while: everything I capture (thoughts, links, plans) should go into one place that’s mine. No app-hopping, no losing things in chat histories.
What went wrong. It was a box, not a brain. It could store the conversation but had no opinion about any of it, no structure, no organising idea, nothing that made finding something later better than scrolling. A logged chat isn’t organised knowledge. A script, not a system; it had nowhere to grow.
What I decided. Shelve it, and don’t come back until I had an actual organising principle rather than a blank database. That took about two months of reading and thinking.
Next era: pa2: PARA + AI