My great grandfather was a doctor named Piper.
Country vet. Sharon, Wisconsin. He’s gone now.
But his screws aren’t.
They’re in a drawer in my shop — a beat-up metal cabinet, army green, labeled OLG 1. Old Granddad. Dr. Piper. Wood screws, carriage bolts, cabinet knobs. A lifetime of building things, sorted by hand, stored with intention.
Nobody wrote down what he built with them. Nobody mapped his system. Nobody left instructions.
But I kept them. And I named the cabinet after him.
The Problem
There are sixty tape measures in my shop.
Not because I’m careless. Because each individual decision to buy another one was reasonable — and no single decision had a record of what came before it.
Without a system, abundance becomes a burden. You spend more time looking for things than using them.
I didn’t build an app. I built a grammar.
What HL Is
A simple, free, open-source way to give anything — any object, any space, any drawer full of old screws — four things:
- A location (where it lives)
- A name (what it is, noun first, always)
- A relationship (what it belongs to, what belongs to it)
- A record (that it existed, and why it mattered)
GR-WS-S2-B0
Garage → Workshop zone → South wall, column 2 → Second shelf
FASTENER-SCREW-WOOD-MIXED-VINTAGE — OLG1
VEHICLE-TRACTOR-FORD-9N-1939 — DR-PIPER
Human readable. Machine readable. AI readable. Works on paper. Works in a phone note. Works in a GitHub repo. Scales to a homelab running a local LLM.
The iron rule: No rule can make the system more complicated than no system at all.
How to Start
You don’t need software. You don’t need to label everything today.
You just need one space. One zone. One shelf. One item with a name and a home.
Or go straight to GitHub →
The HL System is free, open-source, and built to outlast its inventor. Nothing is lost. Everything is logic.