TL;DR : I had 50+ markdown files across reports/, products/, INBOX/. Maintaining INDEX.md by hand was painful. Replacing it with YAML frontmatter on every file + a 200-line Python scanner cut indie dev overhead by ~30 min/day. Here's the schema and the scanner.

The pain

Every indie hacker hits this point: you have ~30 markdown files across categories. You write an INDEX.md to catalog them. By the time you ship 5 more files, INDEX.md is stale.

You update INDEX.md. Two days later, stale again.

You write a script to auto-generate INDEX.md from filenames. It works. But filenames don't carry semantic info — priority, ETA, revenue forecast, status. The auto-INDEX is shallow.

The fix: stop maintaining a separate index file . Put metadata IN each file as YAML frontmatter. Have a scanner read all files, parse frontmatter, generate index views on demand.

This is the "manifest-first" pattern.…