amirouche

It needs polish here and there, but the results hold up, and some of its quirks surprised me in good ways. No ads, no tracking, no personalisation.

The corpus:

English (93M docs, 2.1 TB): Stack Overflow, arXiv, Wikipedia, Hacker News and Lobsters up to 2020

French (18M docs, 0.5 TB): theses.fr, Persée, Gallica, Wikisource, Wikipédia

How it’s built, since that’s probably the interesting part here:

Everything is Chez Scheme. The storage layer is an ordered key-value store (it implements SRFI-167/168, which I wrote) running as an LSM tree.

The C parts: libtls, liburing, picohttpparser, libc. French and English are separate indexes. Mixing them corrupted document frequencies in an earlier version, because French and English words collide after stemming.

Known weaknesses: ranking is the next big piece of work.

What would help most: a query where it failed you, or a source you think belongs in the corpus and why. I’m especially curious which corpora people would put in a “technical history” index.

The code isn’t public yet. I want to see what people actually use before I freeze the design.

Two small PRs, each based on a single prompt, resulted in a CLI that captures the core idea. The goal was to make it relatable to others—let me know if it resonates with you.

Observations & Process: Claude asked a lot of clarifying questions, while ChatGPT "hallucinated" a broader "cognitive ecology" (likely because I’d mentioned the project under the name "mobius"). The final README reflects a blend of ChatGPT’s grandiose vision and Claude’s more grounded approach. It frames ouverture as a symbiotic post-LLM relationship—a bridge between existing knowledge (including code) and post-LLM AI systems.

The Bigger Picture: If ouverture succeeds, it could become an infrastructure like npmjs—but with less friction, less drama, and fewer barriers. The irony? The README’s vision remains relevant even without LLMs. The core idea—content-addressable, multilingual code—stands on its own.

Origins & Goals: This idea has been brewing for over a decade. My original goals were:

Code as a reusable resource: Write a function, store it, forget it, and retrieve it later—dependencies and all—without the hassle of reinventing wheels (e.g., leftpad or buried helper functions). Lowering cognitive barriers: Enable people to contribute to code without requiring English proficiency, aligning with the "think globally, act locally" ethos.

Inspirations: Key projects that shaped this thinking:

- Unison (content-addressable code) - Abstract Wikipedia (multilingual knowledge) - Situated Software