The Hollow Lane Library keeps its whole world in a cabinet of little wooden drawers. Every book, every member, every loan — a paper card. It worked for eighty years, right up until it didn't: cards wander off, copies vanish, and nobody can say whether The Left Hand of Darkness is on a shelf, in a bag, or under somebody's bed.

You have a plan. The library is getting a real system, and you're going to build it yourself — this notebook is the guide.

First, the tools. Vantage UI is a native app: it runs on your machine and talks straight to your data. Nothing gets sent anywhere you didn't point it at.

Every catalogue starts empty. When Vantage opens, it greets you with a welcome screen — choose Create New Project… and pick a fresh folder. Call it library.

Vantage fills the folder with four drawers, and they'll feel familiar — they're the card catalogue's drawers, reborn:

datasource/  where the data lives
table/  what kinds of things exist
page/  what you see on screen
menu/  how you move around

Everything in them is plain YAML text. You can read it, change it, and keep it in git like any other work worth keeping.

You could write all that YAML by hand. You could also alphabetise eighty years of loan cards by hand. Neither is the plan.

Open a terminal in your library folder and start Claude Code — or whichever coding agent you keep around. The project already carries agent skills: instructions that teach your assistant exactly how Vantage projects work.

From here on, the rhythm is: you describe, the assistant writes, Vantage hot-reloads. You stay the librarian-in-chief; the assistant is the world's fastest typist.

A catalogue needs somewhere safe to keep its records. The library has one waiting: a SurrealDB database in the cloud, already set up for this story.

A datasource is the connection card — one small YAML file that says where the data lives and how to reach it. Secrets never go in the file itself: they live in the project's .env, and the YAML refers to them as ${VARIABLES}.

Hand your assistant the connection below and let it write the card.

Here's the first real librarian's insight, and it's subtle: “a book” means two different things. There is the title — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969 — and there are the three battered copies of it on the shelf.

So we keep two tables. book holds the idea: title, author, year. physical_book holds the objects: barcode, shelf, and which title each copy belongs to. Three copies, one book — no card ever written twice.

A table file lists its columns and their types. A page file puts a table on screen. Ask, and both appear.

A library isn't a list — it's a web. A member takes out a loan; the loan points at one physical copy; the copy belongs to one title. Four tables, holding hands.

In Vantage these are references: a column in one table that points at a row in another. Declare them, and the app understands the web — click a member and walk to their loans, from a loan to the exact copy, from the copy to its title.

This is the moment the drawers stop being drawers. Paper cards can't follow a thread; your catalogue now can.

Miss Odessa inspects returned books the way a jeweller inspects stones. Your columns can be just as particular.

Give each copy a condition that is a choice, not free text: mint → good → worn → retired. Dates should be real dates. And a loan is never deleted when a book comes back — returned_on simply gets filled in. An empty returned_on is the definition of “still out”, and the filled ones are your history, kept forever.

Columns can also compute: a little Rhai expression can mark a loan overdue by comparing due_on with today — the table does the judging for you.

Tables answer questions one row at a time. Some questions are bigger: What do people actually borrow? Which shelves are wearing out? Was the summer reading club a hit?

For those, Vantage gives you charts and dashboards — pages that draw their answer instead of listing it. Loans per month as a line. Top titles as bars. Conditions as a pie you can worry about.

And views compose richer detail screens: a book's summary card — cover, copies, current borrowers — assembled from the web of references you built in chapter six.

One ritual remains. When a member borrows a book, Miss Odessa doesn't edit three cards — she stamps one. Your app deserves the same single, confident gesture.

Actions are buttons with meaning. Check out on a copy: pick the member, and a loan appears, due in three weeks. Return on a loan: stamp returned_on, and nudge the copy's condition if the river got to it. Send to repair: worn becomes good again. Each action is a few lines of Rhai in the inventory — written, of course, by your assistant.

And with that, the drawers close for the last time. The Hollow Lane Library runs on your app now — every copy accounted for, every loan remembered, every question one click away. Miss Odessa stamps the final paper card and pins it to the wall. For the museum, she says.