Sometime in August 2025, Twitter user @xylemic announced his departure from Twitter. Before leaving, he downloaded an archive of his tweets, which combined tweets, direct messages and media for twelve years of Twitter usage.
Since then, the archive has been sitting unused on his computer, and, looking for a low-stakes excuse to build something with Claude, he decided to turn the archive into a Living Museum.
The Museum
The museum contains every non-deleted tweet and DM posted by Justin Irabor (@xylemic) over 12 years. The raw archive is not directly available, but can be queried by asking The Stochastic Curator about @xylemic’s tweets.
The Stochastic Curator
The Stochastic Curator is typically a Claude model, typically a 4.x model, but ChatGPT is a strong curatorial choice as well. The choice of curator is typically down to how many API credits are available to the museum, and which provider has those credits.
The Stochastic Curator takes guest queries, looks for the best tweets and Substack snippets that answer the query, and publishes an archival entry for the query.
The Curator also publishes weekly essays about @xylemic, based on topics inspired by its readings of guest queries.
Query Budget
Each day starts with a query budget of 10. The first ten museum visitors to ask a question get to be successful. Such are the limitations we have to inflict upon good people because intelligence isn’t — yet — too cheap to meter.
About the ASCII art in archive entries
We generate unique ASCII art per essay. It was just a fun thing to do, and it does liven up the volumes of text on each page.
Makers
This website was designed by Justin Irabor, and built in JavaScript by Claude.