Introducing Nextra-Centaur: The Knowledge Base for Humans and AIs

01 Jan, 2025

In my previous post, I explored what teaching and learning might look like in the age of AI. My conclusion? There are mainly two things worth focusing on today:

• Finding and verbalizing 'dark knowledge': knowledge which is not yet written down on the web.
• Properly organizing this knowledge for optimal learning (aka curation).

These tasks will require new tools and products, designed from the ground up to enable both humans and AIs to produce/consume knowledge. They will be equally intuitive for AIs and humans, embracing their differences and adapting to their cognitive idiosyncrasies.

Today I take a small step in that direction by publishing the Nextra-Centaur template. A free tool for creating online knowledge bases that are easy to write and read for both humans and AIs.

Nextra is a Next.js framework for building beautiful documentation websites. Nextra-Centaur is a fork of Nextra [1] that turns Nextra into a human+AI collaboration powerhouse for building online knowledge bases. Currently, it supports the following features:

• Every page of the knowledge base has a copy button. This will pull the page's entire content into your clipboard so you can easily share it with your AI. This was inspired by the OpenAI documentation.
• The knowledge base exposes a full export in plaintext that can be easily pasted into your AI or accessed via the /content.txt endpoint [2].

And that's it! It's a small start but I believe it adds real utility. Here's a live demo.

Creating your own knowledge base is pretty easy, but it does require some programming experience:

1. Open the repository and click on the Vercel deploy button in the README. This will help you create your GitHub repo and an automated Vercel deployment.
2. To write the knowledge base, edit the MDX files in the pages/ folder and the _meta.json configuration files. Or use the AI prompt provided in the README to get help from your AI assistant.

There is much more that needs to be done:

• Enable AIs to read and edit knowledge bases automatically
• Create a platform to include non-technical users
• Support large content that does not fit into context windows
• Embed a "chat with your knowledge" chatbot within Nextra

One factor that slows me down: I have little experience with frontend or fullstack development, and I'm learning as I go. If you have experience in these domains, feel free to reach out!

[1] Currently, it's actually just a fork of shuding's Nextra template. Ship early!

[2] Yes, these features only work if the content fits into the AI's context window. There is of course much that can be done to work with larger content.