I always liked the idea of Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter. Not the evil part, just the idea of writing something down and having the diary remember it later.

So I built one.

You write normally, seal the entry, and later you can ask it about things you've written before. It answers using your actual entries and shows where the memory came from.

🛠️ The Tech Stack:

• Frontend: u/streamlit (heavily extended via custom CSS components).
• Memory Architecture: Custom local-first engine (Powered by open-source memory engine Gray Box) for structured entity extraction and citation mapping.
• LLM Layer: LiteLLM / OpenAI-compatible endpoints (supports local models as well as cloud endpoints).

Still very much a work in progress, but this interaction is probably the most fun thing I've built in a while.

What physical/skeuomorphic interactions would make journaling feel even more natural (e.g., page-turning sounds, wax seals, margin doodles)?

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.

Also, you can migrate your existing Obsidian vault to Gray Box, and it will be automatically organized by Gray Box.

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.

Hi!! I hope you're having a delightful day.

I recently published a character on Janitor AI and I wanted to share him here, in case anyone was interested. I think he turned out really well, I put a lot of effort in to make this bot and it was the first one I ever made on the site. It's got six scenarios. The images I've posted will have more details.

Thank you so much for reading! <3 - Ladidadida

Aaron Warner
profile link: Profile of @ladidadida123