The Liberty Archive FREECAPITALISTS.ORG

Engineering record

How this site is built

I rebuilt and republished the webmaster-era Mises.org library as a static archive, directing a fleet of AI coding agents. The interesting engineering is not code generation. It is the system of gates and records that decides what generated work is allowed to ship.

I assembled and open-sourced this collection while serving as Mises.org webmaster from 2004 to 2014. Its rights are mixed, so each item passes its own rights record rather than inheriting a blanket claim. A large share of this repository is versioned catalog data, not artisanal code, and I review the generated work before deployment.

The repository is private because it contains rights deliberations and scraped working sidecars. This page therefore makes the output auditable: every claim points to a live artifact, the measured archive statistics, or the commit-subject audit trail.

The build record

Git figures refresh on every build. Code and data figures come from a dated tokei snapshot.

498CommitsFrom git history
23Days of commit history2026-07-21 to 2026-08-12
40,308Python lines in 119 filesMeasured 2026-08-12
92Versioned scriptsMeasured 2026-08-12
30Generator modulesMeasured 2026-08-12
42Governing specsMeasured 2026-08-12
1,481,206Versioned JSON data lines, not codeMeasured 2026-08-12

The archive those systems govern

Computed from the same in-memory catalog model as the statistics page.

948BooksCounted at build time
165Lecture seriesCounted at build time
2,732RecordingsCounted at build time
18PeriodicalsCounted at build time
47 millionExtracted book wordsCounted at build time
1,520Hours of recordingsCounted at build time

Four models, four pipelines

Each model has a gate and a proof

These are production artifacts, not model demos. The model is named, its measured output is stated, and the constraint that can stop it is visible beside it.

01

Text-to-speech audiobooks

Chatterbox (Resemble AI, MIT, 350M) narrates, conditioned on a short reference clip per speaker.

Measured output
The I, Pencil pilot narrates 2,657 words into a 13.8-minute M4B with 2 chapter markers, read by 2 machine-built voice clones of Leonard E. Read and Milton Friedman.
Gate
The book's own derivative-rights decision must allow the artifact. A cloned voice needs a second, separate record: each reference clip carries its source and its rights rationale before it is used, and one of these two rests on a fair-use argument rather than a cleared right. Machine origin and every clone are disclosed beside the player and in the file metadata.
Live proof
Listen to I, Pencil, with the per-chapter voice disclosure

02

Speech-to-text transcripts

faster-whisper, primarily the medium model with float16 CUDA, transcribed the recording library.

Measured output
2,719 recordings transcribed, 1,515.7 hours and 12,405,327 words. Quality filters then withheld 18 of them, 5,424 words, leaving 2,701 transcripts published.
Gate
Two publication filters reject low-language-probability output and obvious repetition. The rights basis is an operator authorisation, not a licence.
Live proof
Read a player-synced lecture transcript

03

OCR and ebook recovery

Tesseract LSTM with tessdata_best recovers text from scanned books. Calibre handles the adjacent PDF-to-EPUB conversion pipeline.

Measured output
Richard von Strigl's scan yielded 56,601 words across 164 pages, and Ludwig von Mises's scan yielded 30,505 words across 87 pages, each text layer embedded back into its PDF. Separately, 219 of 948 books gained an EPUB from a PDF.
Gate
OCR is deliberately manual, so every run is logged with its language, page count and date. Every conversion is recorded in a provenance sidecar, and a changed file is protected from overwrite.
Live proof
Open the OCR-recovered Die ökonomischen Kategorien und die Organisation der Wirtschaft OCR run 2026-08-11

04

Commissioned book covers

gpt-image-1 through the OpenAI Images API produces candidates from per-book content briefs.

Measured output
15 model-generated covers sit within a protected commissioned tier of 20 covers, each based on a book-specific brief.
Gate
Briefs specify content, not composition. Candidates are reviewed at 300-pixel card size, and an installed commission enters a tier that no bulk job may overwrite.
Live proof
See a commissioned Economics in One Lesson cover

The bulk cover system is separate: PDF screenshots and typographic covers are deterministic Pillow rendering, with no generative model involved.

The generator

A small static core with standing gates

Python 3.11+, Jinja2, and Pillow generate the site without a web framework or front-end build tool. A content digest per output file keeps unchanged files out of the publish and SEO passes. Re-timed on the 2026-08-12 catalog, an unchanged build takes about two minutes and a full-template rewrite about four.

  1. SEO gateEvery page needs a valid title, description, canonical URL, and JSON-LD document, or the build fails.
  2. Artifact provenanceA generator may overwrite a file only when its bytes still match the digest it recorded. A human override is protected.
  3. Rights engineEach book gets four independent decisions: host the file, publish full text, make a derivative, and bulk-export. The archive publishes 92.1 GB and holds back another 51.4 GB.
  4. Stats self-countThe statistics page re-derives its own page count last and raises if the number disagrees with the sitemap.

How the agents work

The operating system is the product

42 governing specs are contracts. A routing table sends an agent to the smallest document set that governs its task, so it does not have to rediscover the project or load every decision at once.

Agents commit and push freely. Deployment is the only approval gate, and I run it. Failed approaches stay in the record when they can prevent the next agent from repeating the same wrong diagnosis.

The public audit surface is the output: every commit subject is listed in the changelog, the statistics are rebuilt from the catalog, and each generated artifact carries the evidence its own gate requires.

Who

David Veksler

I built and maintain this archive. For the broader engineering record and contact details, visit David Veksler's site.