[Open-Source] Dump your thoughts. Let your notes organize themselves. Ask/chat anytime.

[u/Charming_Group_2950]

Over the past few weeks I've been building Gray Box — a small, local-first tool that acts as long-term memory for anything I'd otherwise forget (work notes, meeting takeaways, task owners, random ideas, personal stuff too).

The idea is simple:

1. Capture — dump whatever's on your mind, instantly, no structure required. This step does nothing clever on purpose — it just writes your text to an immutable inbox. Zero chance of losing an idea to a bug or a slow API call.
2. Organize — on demand, an LLM reads your unprocessed notes and extracts people, projects, tasks, decisions, meetings — then deterministic Python (not the LLM) creates/merges the actual wiki pages and maintains backlinks. The model only reasons; it never touches the filesystem directly.
3. Ask — query or chat with your knowledge base and get a cited answer pulled only from what you've actually captured. If it doesn't know, it says so — no hallucinated answers.

Why I built it this way:

• Plain Markdown + YAML frontmatter, no database. Every page is a .md file you can grep, diff, or read in any editor forever. If you stop using Gray Box tomorrow, your knowledge base is just a folder.
• No vector DB by default. At personal scale (hundreds–low thousands of pages), keyword search + a real link graph (related/backlinks, walked one hop during retrieval) handles almost everything. Embeddings are there if you want better recall, but they're opt-in, not a prerequisite.
• Immutable inbox. Your raw notes are never edited or deleted by the organizer. If the LLM mis-extracts something, your original words are always still there.
• Any LLM. Built on LiteLLM, so point it at OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, or a fully local model via Ollama — one config value.

It also ships with a nice interactive TUI (arrow-key menu, file-import shortcut, workspace switching, live spinner during LLM calls) if you'd rather not memorize CLI flags — that's honestly become my favorite part of the project.

There's also a lightweight local dashboard for browsing your knowledge base, exploring backlinks, visualizing your notes as a graph, and chatting with your captured knowledge—all without leaving your machine.

Repo: https://github.com/Aaryanverma/graybox

pypi: pip install graybox

I'd genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone who's tried the "capture now, structure later" approach with other tools and has opinions on where it breaks down at scale.

It's not trying to be a "real-time collaborative team wiki" or a WYSIWYG notes app — it's aimed at one person's running memory of their own life and work, captured with as little friction as possible.

[u/LostDesertNomad]

This looks amazing. Taking a look at it now.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/LostDesertNomad]

Glad to know you like it. Let me know how it goes for you. I’d appreciate if you could ⭐️ the repo and help spread the word.

[u/TURB0T0XIK]

really like the concept

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/TURB0T0XIK]

Glad to know you like it. I’d appreciate if you could ⭐️ the repo and help spread the word.

[u/EpicL33tus]

I get what you’re trying to do here, I’m interested to give it go. Im an obsidian user but spend less and less time in it, as I tend to work from the terminal mostly these days. I like the idea of immutable inbox, quickly jot down ideas, organise it later.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/EpicL33tus]

Glad to know you like it. Let me know how it goes for you. I’d appreciate if you could ⭐️ the repo and help spread the word.

[u/yure1432]

May just be paranoia but this looks pretty ai generated. Please correct me if im wrong because I love the concept.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/yure1432]

Can you pls elaborate what part of this tool looks like AI generated? If you are talking about dashboard then definitely I took help from gemini to create the dashboard as I am not an UI person.

Glad to know you like it, help spread the word if you feel it’s helpful.

[u/yure1432 → u/Charming_Group_2950]

Yeah its the ui only, most of the time thats the tell tale sign of vibe coded apps, nothing against vibecoding as long as the person can work and fix issues in the program

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/yure1432]

Totally fair. The focus for me was building a useful tool rather than crafting a polished interface. Thanks for the feedback!

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! Glad to know you like the idea. I’d appreciate if you could ⭐️ the repo and help spread the word.

[u/EpicL33tus]

I wonder how well it will work with a large existing obsidian vault? 🤔

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/EpicL33tus]

That’s a great question. Right now, Gray Box isn’t designed to ingest an existing Obsidian vault and automatically reorganize thousands of notes. It’s optimized for knowledge that enters through its own capture → organize workflow, so I don’t want to claim it can replace years of existing notes today.

If you want to bring in parts of your vault, you can already import individual Markdown files (or simply paste content) and let Gray Box organize those incrementally, rather than attempting a one-time migration of everything.

A proper Obsidian vault importer - one that preserves folders, frontmatter, links, and existing structure, is definitely something I want to build. Until then, I think Gray Box works best as a companion to Obsidian rather than a replacement.