// projects

Ask the Ancients

Live

A philosophy app where every answer arrives with the page it came from. I designed it, I run it, and I charge for it.

*Landing page: ask a question, or let the Ancients pick who answers*

*Every claim links to the passage it came from, with book, section and translation*

*The Agora: two philosophers, one question, and a note on where they part ways*

*Ten philosophers across Stoic, Greek, Indian and rationalist traditions*

*Free to start. Paying changes how far you can explore, never the grounding*

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// summary

Ask a question, and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, the Buddha or Shankaracharya answers in their own voice, using only passages retrieved from their own writing. Every claim comes with its passage attached, so you can check the reading yourself. When nothing in the text answers the question, the philosopher says so.

Ten philosophers across Stoic, Greek, Indian and rationalist traditions, and four ways to ask. Chat with one philosopher. Put two side by side in the Agora. Convene a Council of three who review each other’s answers before a judge sums up. Or open a Quorum, an openly synthetic group discussion.

It is free to start, with paid plans for going deeper. I lead it end to end, with Claude Code and Codex as the engineers on the team. The write-ups cover how it was built and what it costs to run.

// tech stack

Frontend

Next.js 16 React 19 Tailwind CSS

Backend

Convex Clerk

Language

TypeScript

AI / ML

OpenRouter Hybrid RAG

Infrastructure

Cloudflare Workers AI Gateway GitHub Actions

Observability

Langfuse Sentry PostHog Better Stack

Testing

Vitest Playwright

Tooling

Bun

// write-ups

2026-09-25 11 min read

RAG Is Plumbing. I Wanted to Build a House.

Everyone talks about RAG as chunks, embeddings and re-ranking. Ask the Ancients is what happened when I made it the foundation of a paid product, with four different ways to explore the same texts.

airagproductevalspricingllm

Ask the Ancients

// summary

// tech stack

// write-ups

RAG Is Plumbing. I Wanted to Build a House.