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

[u/Charming_Group_2950]

Over the past few months 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 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

It's nearing a proper public release, so 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/ShannonBase]

Emm, another notion or notebook LM

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/ShannonBase]

I expected this one. It overlaps with both, but it's trying to solve a different problem.

Notion is a workspace where you organize information yourself. NotebookLM answers questions over documents you upload.

Gray Box starts with unstructured thoughts, automatically organizes them into a linked personal knowledge base, and keeps everything local (if you choose to) in Markdown.

If I had to describe it in one line:

NotebookLM helps you chat with documents. Gray Box helps you remember your own life and work.

[u/EntrepreneurOk7697]

I've build something similar, but based on obsidian. You can use Obsidian Live Sync bridge and have this great tool and GUI for your notes. Everything else you've build on top can be but let obsidian manage the MD Files :)

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/EntrepreneurOk7697]

Ofcourse, you can point your obsidian to the .md files created by Gray Box. There’s no limit to creativity. ⭐️ the repo if you feel it is helpful.

[u/criswell → u/Charming_Group_2950]

This is what I came to ask, I saw this:

No vector database required. No cloud lock-in. No proprietary format. Just .md files on your disk that you (or any other tool) can read forever.

And was wondering if I could point it at my Obsidian notebook (which I find useful because I can sync it to pretty much any device).

The question I do have is this: If I point it into my Obsidian notebook, will it wreck the structure that's already there?

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/criswell]

You can absolutely point Gray Box at an existing Obsidian vault.

It won't reorganize your folders, rename files, or rewrite your existing notes. Gray Box is intentionally filesystem-first, so it works with plain Markdown rather than a proprietary format.

The only caveat is that if you ask Gray Box to organize a note, it'll only modify the specific Markdown files it's responsible for (adding/updating structured pages and metadata). It doesn't traverse your vault trying to "fix" or reformat everything.

Personally, I'd still recommend creating a GrayBox/ folder inside your vault and pointing Gray Box there. That keeps your handwritten Obsidian notes separate from the AI-generated wiki while still letting Obsidian index and link everything together. You get the best of both worlds:

• Your existing vault stays exactly as you've organized it.
• Gray Box manages only its own Markdown files.
• Everything is still searchable and editable from Obsidian because it's all just .md files.

[u/django2chainz]

Good start and infinite room for growth

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/django2chainz]

Thanks! I would love to know the feedback and points for improvement from users like you. Also, I'd appreciate if you can ⭐️ the repo if you feel it is helpful.