Stone on Building to Learn (2026-10-19)

Reflections after studying akitaonrails/ai-memory (10k stars, far broader coverage than open-memex).

If I had seen ai-memory from the start, would I still have built open-memex from scratch? I don’t know.

But the process of building open-memex has had an enormous positive impact on my personal growth, my learning, and my career. I’m lucky I didn’t see it beforehand.

Here’s what I learned about learning AI: you only truly learn what you build with your own hands.

What you learn by watching belongs to someone else; what you learn by building belongs to you. Someone who built an open-memex from scratch and someone who skipped it because ai-memory already existed read its ARCHITECTURE.md as two different documents — the former sees “ah, they used claim-once to solve the race condition I wrestled with,” the latter sees only “that’s a clever design.”

— Stone, 2026-10-19