What do you do with 100 technical books you'll never finish reading? I built an MCP. I've been collecting high-quality technical books for years, mostly from Humble Bundle sales (IYKYK). Some I've read. Some I keep meaning to. But they're all sitting right there on my hard drive, over 100 of them, so the question became: how do I get more value out of what I already own? Keyword search doesn't cut it. If I want to answer "how do I justify decoupling to a skeptical executive?", the relevant passages say things like "selling architecture" or "business risk." You'd have to already know the answer to find it. And there was a second motivation: I'd been circling RAG at a theoretical distance for a while. I wanted to understand the patterns firsthand, not from diagrams. So I built a semantic search engine over my own library, exposed as an MCP server that Claude can query. Everything runs locally: embedding, vector storage, retrieval....
Corinna Cohn—finding the right questions