Skip to content

Home

lode

lode is an AI-first, TUI-first personal knowledge base for the things you learn during your day at work. Fast to capture, intelligent to retrieve.

The mother lode: a rich vein you accumulate and mine. An append-only log of notes + a derived knowledge graph -- the ore and the assay.

Meeting notes, technical instructions, decisions -- captured fast, retrieved with citations.

$ lode add
$ lode ask "what did we decide about auth?"

Install

lode does not publish to PyPI, so pip install lode installs a different, unrelated project -- see release.md's Non-goals.

From a release (no clone needed). Download the wheel from the GitHub releases page and install it directly:

pip install lode_kb-*.whl   # the wheel attached to the release you downloaded

From source (for contributing or tracking trunk).

git clone https://github.com/bildzeitung/lode.git
cd lode
./scripts/python-init.sh
. ./venv/bin/activate

The idea in one breath

Capture is cheap and frequent; retrieval is rare and valuable. The whole point of the AI is to make capture worth it because you trust you can always ask later and get a cited answer grounded in your own notes. The TUI keeps capture instant; intelligence runs async or on demand — never in the capture path.

Read more

  • Design -- the core problem, the primary bet, principles, and build sequencing
  • Storage -- the ownership boundary, event-sourced version chains, the data shape
  • Retrieval -- the hybrid retrieval pipeline: FTS5 + vectors, rerank, graph expand
  • Externals -- external sources, the knowledge graph, link-rot immunity, privacy
  • Brand -- the brand brief: positioning, palette, type, voice
  • How-to guides -- task-oriented recipes

This page mirrors README.md, the canonical pitch read on GitHub. See the sync note in docs/stack.md for how the two stay in sync.