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Abubakersiddique771
Abubakersiddique771

Posted on • Originally published at Medium

I Gave GitHub Copilot Access to My Private Notes 🤯📓

"What if your AI pair programmer knew everything you’ve ever learned?"

In school, we’re told to take notes.
In dev life, we forget they exist after saving notes.md.

So I asked myself:
What happens if I feed my entire dev knowledge — journal entries, notes, tips, terminal commands — into GitHub Copilot or an LLM?

Answer:
I built a personal knowledge-trained Copilot clone, and suddenly I was pair programming with… my past self.

This is how I turned years of scattered markdowns into the most useful coding companion I’ve ever had.


💡 The Problem: Your Knowledge Is Trapped

Let me guess:

  • You’ve saved cheatsheet.md, til.txt, and docker-fix-notes.md
  • You wrote blog drafts, copied StackOverflow tricks, and kept AI prompts
  • But when it’s time to use them, you can't find or recall anything

What if you could just type:

“What’s the trick I used for SSH tunneling inside Docker Compose?”

And get an instant answer from your own writing, inside VS Code?


🧠 The Idea: Build a Self-Trained Coding Copilot

Instead of asking an AI “how to do X,” I wanted an AI that answered:

“How did I do X in the past?”

So I built a local LLM that:

  1. Reads all my .md, .txt, .ipynb, and .bash_history
  2. Indexes them into a searchable database
  3. Responds to natural language queries like:
  • “How did I deploy that huggingface model?”
  • “What did I learn about PostgreSQL full text search?”
  • “What alias did I use for kubectl?”

And it runs entirely offline using small open-source models like Phi-3, TinyLlama, and Instructor-XL.


🛠️ How I Built It

Component Tool Used
Note ingestion Python scripts + recursive folder scanning
Embedding Instructor-XL (context-aware for dev docs)
Vector DB Chroma
Local LLM Phi-3 via Ollama
Interface VS Code sidebar + CLI
Memory sync Git hooks + Dropbox sync script

🧾 Sample script to index notes:

from langchain.document_loaders import TextLoader
from langchain.vectorstores import Chroma
from instructor_embedding import INSTRUCTOR

docs = TextLoader("/my/notes/").load()
embeddings = INSTRUCTOR()
db = Chroma.from_documents(docs, embedding=embeddings)
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🗣️ Sample query CLI

mycopilot "What’s the SSH trick for Django + Postgres in Docker?"
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Response:

"In til-docker.md, you used ssh -L 5433:db:5432 your-ec2 and added localhost:5433 in settings."


🤖 Why This Works: It’s Like Dev Journaling on Steroids

This isn’t just automation. It’s augmentation.

It solves:

  • 👻 Forgetting how you solved a bug last year
  • 🔁 Rewriting the same bash script over and over
  • 💬 Re-answering questions your teammates already asked

And it teaches you something schools never do:
How to talk to your own mind.


📚 Bonus: I Hooked It Up to My GitHub Repos Too

What if your AI could also answer:

“What was I thinking when I wrote this function?”

So I did this:

  • Pulled my old GitHub repo commit messages
  • Parsed README.md and code comments
  • Linked commits to note entries using timestamps

Now it answers stuff like:

“What’s the difference between tokenizer.py v1 and v2?”

“v2 introduces HuggingFace fast tokenizer; v1 had regex hacks, see 'notes/tokenizer-rewrite.md'”

It’s like GPT met Obsidian + Git + me.


✨ Unexpected Magic

  • 🧠 Improved recall: I remembered why I did something, not just how
  • 🧱 Modular reuse: My old notes turned into reusable snippets
  • 💬 Debugging partner: I’d paste an error and it’d say “You solved this in bugfix-log-2023.md

And guess what?

I started writing better notes, because I knew they’d actually be used.


🧰 You Can Build Yours Too (for Free)

Requirements:

  • A folder of notes, commits, or codebases
  • A free HuggingFace model like Instructor-XL
  • ChromaDB + LangChain
  • Ollama + Phi-3 or mistral-7b (optional)

If you want:
✅ Full walkthrough
✅ GitHub template repo
✅ VS Code extension
Let me know and I’ll publish it all!


🧘 Final Thought: This Is the Future of Learning

AI won’t just write code for us.
It will teach us from our own minds.

Don’t build a second brain.
Build a smart brain that talks back.


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🔓 Premium Bundles for Devs. Who Want to Break Free

These are shortcuts to doing your own thing and making it pay:

🔧 Quick Kits (Take 1 Product That Actually Works for You)

These are personal wins turned into plug-and-play kits — short instruction guides:

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