Dec 27, 2025
I own more books than I can read. Not in a charming, aspirational way, but in the practical sense that at some point I stopped knowing what I owned. Somewhere around 500 books, memory stopped being a reliable catalog.
For years, I told myself I would fix this. Nothing elaborate, nothing worthy of a startup idea. A spreadsheet would have been enough. I never did it, not because it was hard, but because it was tedious.
Part of my personal library
The gap between intention and execution was small, but it was enough to keep the project permanently parked in the someday pile.
By the end of 2025, I had been working with AI agents long enough that this kind of project finally felt possible. Not because they made things more impressive, but because they removed the part I always stalled on. Execution.
The bookshelf project is where I clearly understood what my role becomes once execution stops being the bottleneck.
The problem
I tried the obvious tools first. ISBN scanner apps failed on Romanian editions, and Goodreads could not identify obscure publishers or antiquarian finds. Anything even slightly nonstandard came back incomplete or wrong. Partial data felt worse than no data at all, so every attempt ended the same way: a few entries filled in, followed by abandonment.
What I needed was not a better app, but a way to tolerate imperfection without the whole system falling apart.
... continue reading