Tool Librarian: The Library You Already Vetted
You find a good tool, bookmark it, forget it, and six months later google the same question and land on a worse answer. This keeps a library of the tools you actually vetted, clustered by the state of mind you reach for them in, and answers out of that before it reaches for anything else.
- role
- Solo build: the clustering model, the confirm-before-write rule, and the library-first retrieval
- stack
- Claude skill · Knowledge management · Curation · Published on npm
- status
- shipped · in use
How I got here
I have bookmarked the same category of tool four separate times. Each time I did real research, compared options, picked one, and then lost the conclusion. Six months later I googled the same question and took whatever the top result was, which was worse than what I had already found.
The finding was never the problem. The forgetting was.
How I thought about it
Cluster by state of mind, not by category. This is the part that took a few tries. A folder called "Design tools" is a filing decision, and filing decisions are how libraries die. You do not think "I need a design tool". You think "I need to clean up this screen recording before I send it", and that thought does not map to a category name.
So entries cluster around the situation you reach for them in. Retrieval works because the question you ask months later has roughly the shape of the question you had when you saved it.
No onboarding. Deliberate, and it was the first thing I cut. The library builds itself through use. Asking someone to seed twenty tools before the thing does anything is asking for a chore up front in exchange for a benefit later, which is the exact trade nobody takes.
Ask before writing. It drafts the entry and picks a cluster, then stops and shows you. A librarian that files things without asking is just a second inbox.
What I actually did
Two motions, and that is the whole surface.
Drop a link, and it drafts the entry, picks the cluster, and asks you to confirm before writing anything.
Ask for something back, and it answers from your library first. It names the tool, says why it fits this particular job, and only reaches outside the library when the library genuinely does not cover it. When it does go outside, it says so, because a vetted answer and a guess must never look alike.
Where it's heading
The interesting version is the one that notices a cluster has gone stale, where three of the five entries have been superseded and nobody has looked at that shelf in a year. That is real maintenance rather than storage, and it is not built yet.