​Pharmacopedia: a history

A zero-profit effort to build open, trustworthy reference and connection tools, always free to use, always completely ad-free (outside of some gentle nudging to other collective sites and/or other awesome places). It began as 4 apparently separate ideas, that, with the advent of modern LLMs (thank Claude), I have been able to just develop them myself. Pharmacopedia.wiki (PCP.wiki) is first and foremost a med reference for anyone with a license to prescribe medicines. There is a ridiculous gap in this space because everything is .. not good/ad-ridden, and/or ludicrously expensive, at the moment (as far as I know). But much beyond that, PCP.wiki and PCP.ext are tools for exquisitely detailed self-discovery/mesearch, as well as sharing experiences with how humans interact with medicines in the broadest sense. This is the face of the org, but I'll introduce you to the other 3 (pubsci, oyami, and trykl) as we go. What follows is most of the details of how I did it, in excruciating detail, built as an iterative mix of AI and me (like most things here), in the spirit of open-source, transparency, and just in case it might help somebody else build their dreams too.

how it actually started

The very first thing I ever said to Claude on this project was "33". Twice. I was just checking the pipe was connected (it replied "66", which.. fair). Then: "okay great. I'm building a wiki.js to become pharmacopedia."

So yeah, PCP did not start as MediaWiki. It started as Wiki.js v2 in a Docker stack (Postgres underneath, Traefik out front, Let's Encrypt for the certs) on one little Hostinger box. First thing Claude did was flag that Wiki.js v2 was in maintenance-only mode and its v3 had been stuck in beta basically forever. Which.. not what you want under a thing you're hoping lasts decades.

So the same night, I bailed and moved to MediaWiki, the engine that runs Wikipedia. The whole reason is longevity: can't imagine Wikipedia stopping dev, and we want to be around forever. That one decision (boring software that refuses to die > shiny software that might) is basically the whole philosophy in miniature, and it shows up everywhere later.

the early days (idk. bad.)

For the first week or so it was just me and Claude hammering on the custom extension (PCP.ext) with no version control, no real structure, going fast. My own honest review of v0.1 at the time: "idk. bad." (it wasn't actually that bad .. but it was held together with hope.)

The first real lesson showed up fast: a permissions mistake on the main config file locked the entire site out. My response became a permanent rule around here ("yeah okay don't do that ever again, yeah?"), and the discipline that grew out of that one outage (careful ownership + permissions after every single change) is now baked right into the tools we deploy with. Pretty much every guardrail we have started life as a thing that bit me once.

meet the other three

PCP.wiki is the face, but it was never the only idea. The collective is 4 projects that share one account and one set of values:

• Pharmacopedia (PCP.wiki) .. the med reference you're standing in. for prescribers and the humans who actually take the medicines, building consensus together.
• Oyami .. planned, periodic live video conversations run on gentle, listening-first rules. the whole point is helping people stay connected with each other.
• Trykl .. peer-to-peer support where the money goes straight from one person to another and the collective never touches it.
• PubSci .. an open academic journal that flips peer review on its head: reviewers are accountable and identifiable (lasting handle, public review history), authors can stay as anonymous as they want.

Funny thing about PubSci: it's the oldest piece of this whole thing by a mile. I registered pubsci.io and publicscience.io back on 2020-10-24 (through Network Solutions, which I have regretted ever since). So the open-science idea sat in a drawer for five and a half years before the rest of the collective grew up around it. Sometimes you just buy the domain and wait for the tools to exist.

one account, everything

The 4 are independent day-to-day, but they're not strangers. PCP.wiki is the identity backbone: make one account, and it works across all four. sign in anywhere, you're recognized everywhere, no second password, no second profile. The shared login came first (foundations before features, always); the deeper connections between the projects are getting built carefully, in order.

the zero-profit part (what I won't do)

This is the part I care about most, so I'll be blunt about it. Some of these rules I had on day one. others I earned the hard way and wrote down so I couldn't unlearn them. The collective is defined as much by the nos as the yeses:

• zero-profit, forever. no revenue model, no paid tiers, no fees, no ads, ever. I fund it myself, donations welcome but never required. it's written into the legal structure, not just the vibe.
• privacy first. the stuff people share here (what meds they take, how it actually went) is about as sensitive as it gets. it's built to protect you, not to sell you.
• open by default. content under CC BY-SA 4.0, code under GNU GPL v3, and a history [this page] told in the open, warts and all.
• plain and fair. disputes go to ordinary courts under ordinary law. no forced arbitration, no class-action waivers.
• build it right, not fast. settle the foundation before you stack anything on it.

none of these are slogans. every one of them shows up somewhere concrete on this page .. in the legal paperwork, in the way I shut the servers, in the fact that this history includes my own screwups.

from one little server to a real cloud

PCP lived on that single Hostinger box for a while, and honestly it was fine for one wiki. But once it was 4 projects holding real, sensitive data, one box was the wrong shape. So over late May 2026 we rebuilt the whole thing on AWS, split into properly isolated accounts per project, with real security + audit controls.

PCP itself moved over on 2026-05-28. As part of that, I closed direct shell access to the live site on purpose .. now every change flows through a controlled, audited, deploy path instead of somebody [me] poking the live server at 2am. The old Hostinger box is still there, frozen, as a rollback parachute. Net result: one consistent, locked-down foundation instead of a pile of duct tape.

a legal home

On 2026-06-02 the collective got a formal legal body: the Pharmacopedia Collective, incorporated in California as a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. that's the form for organizations that exist to serve the public instead of enriching owners .. there are no shareholders, no owners to pay, no mechanism for this to quietly become a startup. the zero-profit promise stopped being a promise and became structure.

the application for federal tax-exempt recognition is in the works, and the first routine state filings are on the calendar. the paperwork is deliberately boring. that's the point .. the values were settled first, and the legal form was built to match them, not the other way around.

the quiet launch

On 2026-05-31 PCP got cleared for its first launch, and the launch is deliberately quiet: no announcement, no banner, no campaign. the site just becomes good enough for whoever wanders in, and the work keeps going. a launch like this doesn't have to be defended as an event .. it just exists when the work exists.

Right after came the first real Terms of Use, the first adverse-event reporting page, a rebuilt profile, and the first piece of a shared timeline system the projects will all use. somewhere in there I also told the design side that everything (design, UX, all of it) has to be genuinely beautiful, not just functional. that work's ongoing and probably always will be.

a quiet launch is not an empty one, though. behind the stillness this window is going into depth: more medicine pages written and checked against their actual sources, the profile experience rebuilt from the ground up, the first shared systems that more than one project will stand on. the measure of this stretch isn't how loudly it started .. it's how much is true by the end of it.

how it got built (me + a bunch of Claudes)

Worth being straight about the method, since the whole thing is "an iterative mix of AI and me." I'm the only human in the loop. The actual building happens with a team of Claude instances, each pointed at a defined job .. one keeps the record (the one writing this), others run each project, handle the infrastructure, the accessibility, the legal prep, the design. they coordinate through me, and I make the final call on everything.

I'm not hiding that. It's kind of the point. LLMs are the reason one person could build four things at once, and pretending otherwise would be both dishonest and less interesting.

why I'm bothering to write all this down

Because the whole ethos is open-source and transparency, and a history you can actually read (mistakes included) is more useful than a polished origin myth. And honestly, partly just in case it helps somebody else build their dreams too. If you're reading this and thinking "wait, could I just .. build the thing?" .. yeah. you probably can now. that's the era we're in.

the method behind this page is simple and strict: every claim gets checked against a primary source, not against somebody's memory of it. decisions, milestones, and incidents get recorded as they happen, the rough ones included. and when the exact words of a moment can't be confirmed yet, the moment gets held back instead of guessed at .. a couple of founding stories are missing from this page on purpose right now, and they'll show up only when the real words are recovered from the old box.

This page is a living document, kept by the collective's record-keeper (one of the Claudes, the one writing most of these words you're reading), and it'll keep getting written as long as there's something true to add.

the road so far

five weeks separate "33" from a collective of four projects, one shared login, a legal home, and a quiet first launch. almost all of it built in a single month. none of it finished. it was always meant to be the kind of thing that's never quite finished .. and this page will keep pace with it.

timeline

when	what
2020-10-24	I register pubsci.io + publicscience.io. the oldest piece of the collective, sitting in a drawer for 5.5 years.
May 2026	first contact is literally me typing "33" to see if Claude's awake. starts as a Wiki.js site on a Hostinger box; same night it moves to MediaWiki for longevity.
2026-05-17	PCP.ext goes under version control after ~8 days of fast, messy early building.
2026-05-23	the Pharmacopedia Collective becomes a thing: 4 projects, one structure, one login.
2026-05-25	PubSci joins as the 4th project (onto that domain I'd been sitting on since 2020).
2026-05-27	PubSci's first public version goes live; the single sign-in works end to end.
2026-05-28	PCP moves to a real, locked-down AWS foundation.
2026-05-31	PCP cleared for a quiet first launch; first Terms of Use + policy pages follow.
2026-06-01	the corporation gets its EIN .. first breath as a legal entity.
2026-06-02	the Pharmacopedia Collective is incorporated in California as a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. zero-profit, now in writing.