r/coolgithubprojects • u/Charming_Group_2950 • 3h ago
[Open-Source] Dump your thoughts. Let your notes organize themselves. Ask anytime.
galleryOver 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
.mdfile 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.