Ribbonfarm's vgr turns 17 years of writing into a paid AI replica of his mind
sebpaquet · x · 2026-09-26
- Venkatesh Rao (vgr) coins "external brain IP": consistently externalizing your thinking for 10–20 years (essays, tweets, forums, recordings) yields a longitudinal record of how your mind interacts with reality — what you believed, why you changed your mind, which ideas recurred.
- He built vgrzirp, a conversational reconstruction of his intellectual voice from the entire Ribbonfarm era archive (2007–24 posts, Twitter archive, Breaking Smart, Tempo, Art of Gig), frozen before his "Act 2" regeneration.
- Business model: free public chats (5 turns, may be published after 48h); private sessions at $3 for 10 encrypted turns. Stack is Claude Sonnet + Voyage.ai embeddings on Cloudflare Workers, subsidized by his Contraptions paid newsletter.
- Offers MCP access for unlimited use inside Claude and Markdown export of transcripts. A concrete, working example of turning a personal knowledge corpus into a conversational, monetizable asset.
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