Purpose

"Build things worth keeping. Document things worth remembering. Leave things better than you found them."

Why This Codex Exists

This Codex exists because notebooks outlive the people who fill them.

My father, Clarence Giles, was a journalist, a poet, an author. Before Alzheimer's took his words, and then took him on April 23, 2025, he kept spiral notebooks full of ideas. Health and science. Psychology and philosophy. Culture and race. Poetry. Short fiction. He wanted to start a blog. We talked about it, we planned it, and we never got it done.

Those notebooks still exist. They still speak. If you want to know why I'm writing this, that's it.

Why does Clareifi exist?

Because clarity creates independence, and because the name belongs to my dad. "Please allow me to Clareifi" is my version of something he used to say: lemme break it on down for ya. The Clareifi Collective is the blog he never got to build, grown into everything I'm building now. The writing. The AI ethics and policy consulting. The privacy-first software. The novel. Every word I write is shaped by him or by something he wrote.

What do I want to leave behind?

A body of work, not a feed. My own version of his notebooks, except mine are linked, searchable, and meant to be found. I want my kids to be able to know how I thought, not just what I did. And I want the work itself to be useful to people who never met me.

Who is this for?

Two kinds of readers. The humans who want to understand, and the machines that may one day need to think alongside me. I mean that literally. I work in AI ethics and privacy-first development, and I'm building this record on purpose, on infrastructure I own, so that whatever represents me is something I actually wrote. Not something scraped or inferred or stitched together by an algorithm. First it's for me. Then my family. Then anyone it helps.

What would it mean for this to succeed?

The long answer: it outlives me and stays legible. The nearer answer: it works. It functions as an operating system for one life. If I come back to this page scattered and leave it centered, it's doing its job. And if my kids ever read it the way I read Dad's notebooks now, it succeeded completely.

Life Purpose

Provisional, and allowed to be.

My purpose is to build clarity, for myself, for my family, and for the people my work touches, and to leave an honest record of the attempt.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Build things worth keeping.

Software that respects the people who use it. Privacy by architecture, not policy. A consulting practice that treats AI ethics as real accountability instead of marketing. A novel worth finishing. Businesses my family owns instead of platforms we rent.

Document things worth remembering.

This Codex. My father's archive. Tularosa Threnody. The everyday record at every/word. Writing that gives the reader something, published on infrastructure I control.

Leave things better than you found them.

As a husband, a father of four, an advocate by nature and an ally by choice. In the rooms I'm in at work. In the small corner of the internet I keep.

If there's one thread running through all of it, it's independence through ownership. My work, my data, my time, my story. I'm not chasing scale or algorithmic reach. I'm building slowly and well, and I'm fine being judged by the body of work instead of the metrics.

"It's okay to identify our own objectives in life and call them a purpose." — Buster Benson1

The Story So Far

I'm Euri Giles. Born February 7, 1975, which makes me 51 as I write this. Married to my wife since October 26, 2005. Four kids, ages 14 to 29. Two dogs, three cats. Son of Clarence Giles.

The writing bug came from Dad, the tenured journalist and published poet. The work ethic, and the itch to build something of my own, came from watching him and from two decades of my own working life. I've spent over ten years in IT, most of it in enterprise sales. I worked at Insight in Austin from 2014 to 2017, then came back to Insight in 2022 as a Senior Account Executive covering healthcare, working remote from El Paso.

Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2011. Clareifi started to take shape in the year that followed. The name, the collective, all of it. He died in April 2025. Somewhere in the grief, the unfinished blog stopped being a regret and became a mandate.

Now, in 2026, the work runs in four domains:

• Creative. The writing and the archives, anchored by Tularosa Threnody, a historical novel set in post-Civil War New Mexico, and every/word, the personal channel inspired by Dad.
• Consulting. Clareifi AI: ethics and policy consulting for law firms and small businesses, with the AI Policy Starter Kit as the first product.
• Indie Developer. Clareifi Notes, a zero-knowledge encrypted notes app. Privacy by architecture, proven in code.
• Life/Personal. This Codex, the knowledge systems, the habits that hold the rest together.

In April 2026 I decided to own my publishing outright. clareifi.com runs on self-hosted Ghost as the canonical hub, Bluesky handles the public conversation, and Micro.blog is every/word. Everything else got deleted, and I committed to leaving the stack alone until an October review. A small decision on the surface. Underneath it, a bigger one: stop renting, start owning.

This summer my family and I are relocating to Austin, back to where the Insight chapter started and closer to the tech ecosystem where Clareifi's next chapter happens.

I'm a person building something while still becoming the person who's supposed to build it. This Codex is where I document both.

This page is the root of everything else in the Codex. Come back to it often.

Footnotes

1. Buster Benson is a writer and longtime product leader (Twitter, Slack, Patreon) and the author of Why Are We Yelling? He is widely credited with popularizing the codex vitae as a real-world practice. The term itself comes from Robin Sloan's novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, where members of a secret fellowship each write a "book of life" containing everything they've learned. Inspired by the novel, Benson started his own public codex, a version-tracked "book of beliefs," in April 2012 and has revised it at least yearly ever since, describing it as a way to remember who he is and catch inconsistencies in his own thinking. His example spawned many others, including codices by Tony Stubblebine and Jason Shen, and remains the template most people start from. ↩