local-first · plain markdown · no daemon

Mess in,
coherence out.

Silica turns a messy pile of notes into a knowledge base you can actually navigate. Drop in a raw clipping — it splits it into atomic notes, resolves the [[wikilinks]] between them, and refuses to land a broken graph. Plain Markdown, on your disk.

Inbox/clip.md · raw

read about spaced repetition today. the
testing effect — recalling a fact beats
rereading it. anki schedules reviews with
SM-2. forgetting curve, ebbinghaus. space
your reviews at growing intervals. https://…

Concepts/ · curated

Spaced Repetition.md

↳ [[Forgetting Curve]]

↳ [[Active Recall]]

Active Recall.md

↳ [[Testing Effect]]

Testing Effect.md

One clipping in. Three atomic notes, wired together, out.

$ git clone https://github.com/kiycoh/silica-agent && cd silica-agent && uv pip install -e . && uv run silica init

source

// the run — what one session looks like

Invoke it. Watch it curate.

No daemon, no watcher. Silica works when you call it — then leaves your vault plain Markdown on disk.

silica > /nucleate Inbox/clip.md --target=Concepts
  recon ..... 3 concepts
  distill ... 3 atomic notes
  link ...... 7 wikilinks resolved
  guard ..... graph intact · 0 orphans
  + Concepts/Spaced Repetition.md
  + Concepts/Active Recall.md

raw material → atomic, linked notes. recon, distill, guard.

silica > /find "what do I know about memory?"
  Spaced Repetition.md     embed .82  cooc .77
  Active Recall.md         embed .79  cooc .71
  ~ neighborhood: Forgetting Curve,
                  Testing Effect

ask what you know. every answer carries its evidence — per leg.

silica > /graph
  142 notes · 389 links · 6 communities
  community 2: "retrieval practice"
  community 5: "note-taking systems"
  -> graph.html  (Louvain modularity)

see the structure. communities named from your own words.

silica > /undo Concepts/Active Recall.md
  reverted last patch  (undo journal)
  vault unchanged elsewhere
  nothing lands that you can't take back

every write is journaled. so you can let it work.

// why you can let it work

Built to be trusted with your notes.

The structure that makes a vault legible to you is the same structure that makes it queryable by agents. Silica protects it.

Local-first

[ fs ]

Plain Markdown on your disk. No daemon, no server, no cloud round-trip. Obsidian-compatible, but it doesn't need Obsidian to run.

Reversible

[ journal ]

Snapshots before, gates after, undo for everything. Uncertain edits go to a review queue, not your vault. A regression never lands silently.

Human-first

[ vault ]

The vault stays legible to you. Embeddings and co-occurrence are derived indexes — rebuildable, never the source of truth. No parallel store.

// install — python 3.11+, AGPL-3.0

Point it at a vault.

Clone, install editable, run the wizard. It writes your .env and ends with a diagnostic so you know it's healthy.

$ git clone https://github.com/kiycoh/silica-agent.git
$ cd silica-agent
$ uv pip install -e .
$ uv run silica init     # wizard: vault, backend, models
$ uv run silica          # start the REPL

read the source docs & charter →

Mess in,coherence out.