The brief
The knowledge was never lost. It was scattered: notes apps, browser tabs, a Notion page opened six months ago, and hundreds of conversations with AI that held decisions already made, principles already written, questions already answered. Every new session began by rebuilding context from memory. The tool that held the answers remembered more than the person who asked.
The idea
The law is one sentence: files are truth. No database, no proprietary format, no lock-in. Every note is a markdown file, openable in any editor, forever. The engine reasons on the owner's own key, so the data never leaves the machine, and every output is a file the engine can read back. The vault is the API. A system that can read itself can also repair itself.
The system
Capture once, decide never. A raw thought lands in the inbox and the engine classifies it: principle, idea, project, research, reference. Frontmatter written, folder suggested, three to five related notes linked. Zero decisions at capture time. A thought that costs decisions to save will not be saved.
The structure adapts to the mind, not to a template. After fifty notes the engine sees the pattern and proposes a folder. After two hundred it names the emerging themes. When it meets a concept that should exist, it leaves a gray link, and weekly triage decides: the note is born, or the link dies. No invented stubs, no lost context.
The owner chooses the degree of trust: conservative, moderate, or aggressive. The same engine that files the inbox delivers a morning brief, a night health check, and a weekly synthesis of what the week's notes mean together.
The surface
A vault with two layers: the human folders where work happens, and a machine layer where the engine thinks. The morning brief is the door. The notification is the interface. The one-time import proved the idea: 342 forgotten conversations became 187 linked notes in a single command.
Status
Publicly launched, August 2026, open source. The engine runs the vault it was built for.