The Biggest Questions About AI

Live site: https://elehrer123-arch.github.io/ai-question-hierarchy/

A navigable map of the landscape of thought around AI: 5 sections, 26 subsections, 127 open questions — each with a short framing of the live debate, curated source links, and a maintained stream of substantive recent discussion (690+ tracked pieces and counting). All 127 questions carry recent-thinking coverage; discovery runs weekly.

This is an AI-assisted publication: sweeps, verification, and first-draft synthesis are performed by Claude under docs/stream-policy.md, with the editor directing and spot-checking. Every question page shows its latest sweep date and human-review status (pending → editor-approved). See /methodology/ on the site.

How this repository works

The site is built from structured source data — edit the data, not the HTML. Five public surfaces, each with one job: the map (/, whole-map overview with zoom, in-place disclosure, and an optional discussion-volume lens), browse (/browse/, every section, subsection, and question as a page, including each question's recent-thinking brief), latest (/latest/, all tracked recent pieces chronologically, with filters, search, and RSS), entries (/questions/<slug>/, standalone citable articles), and the poster (/poster/, the radial one-circle view). The classic one-page accordion remains at /all/. /methodology/ explains how the stream is made.

data/              Map content, one JSON file per section
  trajectory.json  safety.json  economy.json  power.json  humanity.json
  recent.json      The stream: featured + tracked pieces per question
  debates.json     Debate-column configs for questions with real camps
  sources.json     Discovery registry (feeds, aggregators, follows)
content/
  questions/       One entry per question (front-mattered Markdown)
templates/
  map.html         Homepage (map) template
  browse.html      Browse template
  index.html       Classic one-page view template (renders to all/)
  entry.html       Entry page template
docs/
  stream-policy.md    Binding editorial policy for the stream
  weekly-discovery.md Standalone weekly discovery procedure
  user-test.md        Reader-test protocol
scripts/
  build.py         Builds everything, with validation (requires: pip install markdown)
  smoke.js         Smoke + accessibility checks (runs in CI before deploy)
  linkcheck.py     Sampled external-link checker (run manually)
index.html         Built map homepage (regenerated by CI on every push)
questions/<slug>/  Permanent page per question (brief + any full analysis)
latest/            Chronological stream + RSS   methodology/  How the site is made
data/history.jsonl Append-only observation history (never edited)
browse/  poster/  all/  questions/   Built outputs

Entries are Markdown files with front matter (slug, title, status, section, scope, dates, optional redirect_from). Each entry belongs to exactly one index question, joined by slug — the display number is derived from data/ at build time, never stored in the entry — and renders to questions/<slug>/, linked from the question on the map. Moved URLs are preserved via redirect_from stub pages.

Every push to main rebuilds and redeploys the site automatically via GitHub Actions. To build locally: python3 scripts/build.py from the repo root.

Question identity

Every question carries three identifiers:

• id — its display number (e.g. 1.3.1). Changes as the taxonomy evolves.
• qid — its permanent internal ID (e.g. q_agent_task_horizons). Never changes.
• slug — its stable URL name (e.g. agent-task-horizons), reserved for future per-question pages. Changed only with a permanent redirect.

When editing: renumber freely, never touch qid, and treat slug as public API.

Editing

• Add or improve a source: edit the question's links array (t title, s source/author, y year, u URL).
• Correct a framing: edit the question's n field.
• Restructure: keep id numbers consistent with their subsection, and run the build locally — validation fails on duplicates, gaps, or malformed links.

Updated August 2026.