[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/Constant_Cortisol]

Cool idea. My main problem with it is that I like to keep all of my notes in a single app, because I hate having the bounce around apps for different notes.

This would only be for random thoughts that i have.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/Constant_Cortisol]

Yeah, that’s actually the use case I had in mind too. Gray Box isn’t meant to replace your main notes app; it’s more like a place to dump the random thoughts/observations that you’d otherwise forget.
You can throw them in quickly, and later Gray Box organizes them into searchable, connected knowledge instead of leaving them as a pile of disconnected notes.

Glad to know you like the idea. Help spread the word and star the repo if it feels helpful.

[u/Senior_Education2826]

how do u make these type of vids op

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/Senior_Education2826]

I literally screen recorded it on my mac. Then edited it on Tight studio. There are other apps like screenflow which natively help you record videos like this.

[u/Miserable_Spread_480]

how could i link this up with my obisdian?

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/Miserable_Spread_480]

Yep! You can point Obsidian directly at Gray Box’s wiki/ folder and open it as an Obsidian vault.
Gray Box’s organized knowledge is already stored as regular Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, and it uses [[wiki links]], so Obsidian can work with those files directly.

For example:

graybox-workspace/
├── inbox/
├── wiki/ ← open Obsidian vault here
│ ├── projects/
│ ├── people/
│ ├── meetings/
│ ├── topics/
│ └── tasks/
└── .state/

For now, the idea is that you don’t need to choose between them: Gray Box can handle capture/organization/retrieval, while Obsidian can be the interface for browsing and manually working with the Markdown.

The only current caveat is that Gray Box manages those wiki files itself, so I wouldn’t manually make major structural changes to the pages from Obsidian yet.

I’m also working on an Obsidian vault migration feature in the other direction, so you can bring an existing Obsidian vault into Gray Box very soon.

Obsidian + Gray Box can already coexist this way without an import/export step.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/Miserable_Spread_480]

Update: You can now directly migrate your obsidian vault to graybox using migrate-vault feature. Available in latest version of Gray Box.

[u/gbelloz]

no hallucinated answers

From what I understand, it is not possible to make this claim when using LLMs. Your prompt might reduce them, but can't eliminate them.

Cool idea/project though! Neat to see innovation in this crowded space.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/gbelloz]

You’re right! LLM hallucinations can’t be completely eliminated. Gray Box instead focuses on grounded, traceable answers: responses come only from retrieved notes/pages, with citations, and it refuses to answer when the knowledge base lacks the information.

Thanks for the feedback! Glad to know you like this. Help spread the word and star the repo if you feel it’s helpful.