A second brain for Claude – my Outline wiki with MCP
Anyone working with several projects and an AI assistant knows the problem: in every repo you explain anew how you name things, what the layer architecture looks like, why you deliberately don't use this one library. The decisions were made long ago. But they live in your head, scattered across repos, and the assistant only ever knows the slice it currently sees. So I started putting that knowledge in one place where both I and Claude can find it. Why Outline – and why self-hosted The choice fell on Outline , self-hosted on its own subdomain. Three reasons tipped the scales. First: I want to keep my data with me and not depend on a vendor. A knowledge store that all my decisions flow into over the years is exactly the kind of asset you don't want in someone else's hands. Second: full data export, any time. If I want to move to a different system tomorrow, I take everything with me. No lock-in. Third: self-hosting opens up better options later – for instance my own RAG, should I ever want to go deeper into searching across my own body of knowledge. I don't need it right now. But the door is open, and that's worth the effort. The cookbook – the heart of it Separate from the individual projects sits its own collection: the cookbook. Cross-project, generic, and that's exactly what makes it valuable. This is where it says how I build, regardless of which product I'm sitting at right now. Roughly, it's split into a few areas: Conventions – naming, code style, docblocks, git commits, markdown, package manager, writing style. The boring but decisive things you'd otherwise re-discuss three times per project. Backend – layer architecture, a unified API error format, test strategy, migrations and indexes, i18n, async jobs and idempotency. Frontend / mobile – feature-first architecture ( core/ , shared/ , features/ ), design system, forms, networking, state, routing, storage, styling, testing. Deployment – my standard setup with Caddy as the edge and a Hetzner VPS. Templates –