The Problem: PDFs Are Knowledge Prisons

You know that feeling when you download a brilliant research paper, only to realize you can’t easily feed it into your AI workflow? Or when you want to add documentation to your knowledge base, but it’s locked in a format that doesn’t play well with version control or LLM tools?

Yeah, I was there last week.

I had just downloaded a fascinating 1.3MB research paper on Generative Engine Optimization and wanted to process it with my AI tools. But PDFs are terrible for this. They’re designed for printing, not for processing. What I needed was Markdown—clean, portable, AI-friendly Markdown.

I recently deployed my Hugo blog to Namecheap shared hosting, using Obsidian as my content editor and Claude Code with PAI (Personal AI) as my copilot. Here’s a walkthrough of every step, from fixing build errors to setting up a fully automated pipeline that goes from Obsidian to live site in a single command.

The Starting Point

I created a Hugo blog project called Augmented Resilience and used the re-terminal theme, a Namecheap shared hosting account, and a GitHub repository. I used Claude Code in VS Code editor and leveraged Daniel Miessler’s Personal AI infrastructure. The goal: get the site live at augmentedresilience.com with a push-to-deploy workflow.