Yesterday I imported my StoryGraph (a famous Goodreads alternative) data into BookHive (a much less famous Goodreads alternative built on atproto).¹

The migration went only partially okay. It imported 50% of my history, and the entries that were imported had wrong or missing data, in particular the dates I started reading them.

Matching books is HARD, so I am not criticizing BookHive. Still, I had to fix all the values, and the task was boring and overwhelming.

Then I realized that BookHive data is hosted on my PDS². So I thought, “What if I give Claude a temporary password and unleash it to fix my data?”

After all, I keep extensive notes on all the books I read (and more) in my Obsidian vault. Each book has start/read dates, scores, ratings, and all the data it needs.

So I asked it. In two minutes, I got this answer:

I logged into your PDS setup (handle davideaversa.it on eurosky.social) read-only (no auth needed for listing) and compared your Bookhive library against the vault. Here’s what I found:

Bookhive already has 229 book records (171 finished, 57 want-to-read, 1 reading) — looks like it was populated recently, likely via a Goodreads import.

Vault has 177 books with a read_on date. Comparing them:

83 matched an existing Bookhive record — of those, 2 are marked wantToRead in Bookhive despite being finished in the vault (On the Calculation of Volume I, Self Editing for Fiction Writers). ~75 have no Bookhive record at all — notably the Steven Saylor Roma Sub Rosa series, Blackwater series, several Star Trek novels, Stephen King titles, the Cixin Liu trilogy, and a batch of Italian-language books (these are likely missing from Bookhive’s catalog/Goodreads matching, or just weren’t in the import). Adding a missing book to Bookhive isn’t a single write — for each one I’d need to search Bookhive’s catalog for a matching hiveId (their internal book-catalog ID), then write a record to your PDS repo referencing it. That’s ~75 catalog lookups plus writes, and some (Italian titles, small press) may not exist in their catalog at all and would need to be skipped or reported.

It was promising. I did a couple of manual checks and then I gave it the green light. Ten minutes later, all my books’ data were synchronized and fixed.

It was a revealing experience. Note that I didn’t have to specify anything: no BookHive API, no structure of BookHive’s lexicon, nothing. The full prompt was:

Can you log in to my PDS (did:plc:w2wvugwwbehm7v774fkgagfl) and update the read book of Bookhive according to my Obsidian book vault?

That’s it. In an era of powerful agents, atproto applications give me a universal API to interact with my data. I think we are only scratching the surface of how awesome this is.

With the upcoming Bases update in Obsidian, this may become obsolete, but for the time being I am still quite happy using Dataview to embed little graphical elements in my notes.

For example, I have a note summarizing all the movies I watched each month. For that I use a combination of CSS and a Dataview query to generate a grid of movie posters. Until recently I used a very simple Dataview query, but I had a problem: if I watched a movie twice in a month, I got only one entry in my poster grid. This is not what I wanted, so I had to do something more complicated.

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const results = [];
const from = dv.date("2025-07-27");
const to = dv.date("2025-08-28");

for (const page of dv.pages('"03 - Literature/Movies"')) {
    const watched = page.Watched;
    if (!watched) continue;

    // Handle both single dates and arrays of dates
    const watchedDates = Array.isArray(watched) ? watched : [watched];

    // Add an entry for each watch date that falls within the range
    for (const date of watchedDates) {
        const watchedDate = dv.date(date);
        if (watchedDate &&
            watchedDate < to &&
            watchedDate > from) {
            results.push({
                poster: page.Poster,
                date: watchedDate
            });
        }
    }
}

// Sort by date descending and display just the posters
dv.list(
    results
        .sort((a, b) => b.date.ts - a.date.ts)
        .map(item => item.poster)
);

So in short, I have a Watched property on my movie notes that can take multiple values, and for each date in the property I add a “poster” entry to the results array. Finally, I sort the results by date descending and display the posters.

Problem solved.

(Btw, let me know if you want the CSS for the grid.)