# Cairn

- URL: https://runtimenotes.com/projects/cairn/
- Published: 2026-06-04
- Status: alpha
- Summary: A personal knowledge base for X bookmarks and likes, with a lightweight knowledge graph and BYOK LLM chat.

Cairn is a small personal knowledge base for my X bookmarks and likes.

I had started using X as a read-it-later placeholder. The saved posts, threads and articles carried a lot of useful signal, but a few thousand saves get hard to work with once they pile up. Cairn pulls them into a database so they are easier to search, organize, chat with and revisit.

## How it works

Cairn imports your saved posts and likes into a local database, then layers search and organization on top. The import side is the harder half of the problem, and I wrote it up separately in [Retrieving likes and bookmarks from x.com](https://runtimenotes.com/blog/retrieving-likes-and-bookmarks-from-x/): the auth, pagination, archive parsing and rehydration involved in getting your own saves out of X.

## The knowledge graph

Behind the scenes, Cairn connects saved posts, links, authors, topics, repos, articles and papers into a lightweight knowledge graph. One save can lead to related posts and forgotten adjacent ideas, so the collection reads less like a flat list and more like a map of what you have been paying attention to.

## Chat with your saves

Cairn supports LLM chat with bring-your-own-key. You point it at your own model and key, then ask questions across everything you saved, without handing your reading history to a service you do not control.

Cairn is at an early, alpha stage and built for my own use.