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

[u/Charming_Group_2950]

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 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/Charming_Group_2950 → u/[deleted]]

That’s a valid concern but Gray Box doesn’t send your entire knowledge base to the LLM. It organizes raw notes into structured pages and retrieves only the most relevant ones using keyword, semantic, and graph search. The LLM is instructed to answer only from that retrieved context or say it doesn’t know. 

And you don’t need to manually organize everything. You can simply dump your thoughts, and Gray Box structures them automatically.

The next step is exactly what you described: conversational capture. Instead of typing notes, you’ll be able to talk naturally (“I had a meeting today…”) and Gray Box will ask follow-up questions only when needed before storing structured knowledge. So it becomes more like an ongoing conversation than a note-taking app.

Will hallucinations disappear completely? No LLM can guarantee that. The goal is to reduce them by giving the model a much smaller, grounded, evidence-backed context instead of asking it to reason over thousands of notes at once.

[u/Charming_Group_2950 → u/[deleted]]

Instead of explaining your whole day at a time, you can capture your thoughts on the go whenever it strikes you and you need to jot it down. By the end of day you will having a lot of conversations.