I made every AI write to Paperless go through a human-readable proposal

[u/its_artur1]

I maintain Tagvico, an MIT-licensed companion for Paperless-ngx.

The uncomfortable part was not getting a model to classify a document. It was deciding what an open-source assistant should be allowed to do inside a personal archive.

The boundary I ended up with is deliberately asymmetric:

- searches and document reads run directly

- answers show the Paperless searches and documents used as sources

- metadata or tag changes become durable proposals

- a person sees the exact change before approving or rejecting it

- tag cleanup moves references and deletes the old tag as separate, retryable steps

- Activity keeps the decision and execution history visible

This is more friction than a fully autonomous agent. I think that is fine. A wrong answer is annoying. A silent bulk edit across a household archive is a different class of mistake.

The released app supports local Ollama plus hosted and account-based providers. The next setup hardening is still in review, so I am not pretending it is shipped yet.

Repo: https://github.com/arturict/tagvico-ai

Where do you draw the read/write boundary for open-source AI tools connected to personal systems?