Tbh I had no idea this was even a thing until recently. I've been working with Rails for a while now and somehow never came across it. So let me explain it the way I understood it. You know how we normally do associations in Rails, User has many Posts, Post belongs to User. Two different models, two different tables. Simple. But what if a model needs to reference itself? Like same table, same mode
The first article on this blog explained how it was built in 30 minutes with Claude Code. Naturally, a blog needs comments. Same constraints: no database, no external dependencies, no Disqus tracking visitors. Just PHP + JSON files. Built in one session with Claude Code — the interesting part wasn't the code, it was the security audit that followed. A comment system without a database seems trivia
When building applications with large language models (LLMs), one of the most overlooked costs is how structured data is represented. Most systems use JSON. And JSON is inefficient for LLM input. KODA (Knowledge-Oriented Data Abstraction) is a schema-first data format designed to reduce token usage when sending structured data to LLMs. It works by: Defining structure once (schema-first) Encoding v