Footnote1

A personal memory you own

Everything an AI believes about you should cite the sentence it came from.2

Footnote is a local-first memory for your life and work. It lives as plain markdown on your machine, and every claim it holds is traceable to its source. A mirror that shows its work, not a clone you have to trust.

Read the code → Install it

The idea

Assistants are becoming the layer between you and everything you read, decide, and remember. Whoever holds the model of you shapes what you see. Footnote's stance is simple: that model should be yours. Legible, portable, and yours to correct.

Notes

  1. Local-first

    Plain markdown on your machine. Export the whole thing, any time. When the files and the index disagree, the files win.

  2. Provenance

    Every claim cites the source it came from. You can open it, correct it, or forget it. No cloud clone can offer this, because it never kept the receipts.

  3. Who wrote this

    It separates what you said in your own words from what a model inferred from your sessions, and shows the evidence behind every line.

  4. Model-agnostic

    Any AI reads and writes your memory over a standard interface. You approve what connects, and a dead daemon never breaks your tools.

  5. Refuses to guess

    When it does not know, it says so, instead of inventing a confident answer from whatever was nearby.

Most of what an AI believes about you, you never actually said.The "Who wrote this?" view

Install

Requires Node 20+ and pnpm. Open source, MIT licensed.

terminal
# clone, build, and set up your vault
git clone https://github.com/Whittle777/footnote.git
cd footnote
pnpm install && pnpm build
pnpm footnote onboard --minimal

Your memory lives in ~/Footnote as markdown you can read, edit, and back up like any other folder.