Footnote

A personal memory you own. Footnote keeps a memory of your life and work as plain markdown on your machine, and every claim it holds about you can cite the sentence it came from.

Most AI memory is a profile of you on someone else's server that you cannot see and cannot take with you. Footnote is the opposite: local-first, exportable, and it shows its work.

The argument

A cloud clone of you, like Memento, has to be trusted: it holds a model of you that you cannot inspect, correct, or leave, and it will guess to stay fluent. That is exactly the thing worth not trusting. Footnote makes the opposite bets, and they are the whole design:

• Local-first. Plain markdown on your machine. The files are the truth and the index rebuilds from them, so you can read, edit, back up, or export the whole thing at any time.
• Provenance. Every claim cites its source, so you can open it, correct it, or forget it. A model of you that cannot show its receipts is not auditable, and a model of you that is not auditable is not trustworthy.
• Who wrote this. It separates what you said in your own words from what a model inferred, because those are different kinds of statement and collapsing them is how a memory starts lying confidently.
• Model-agnostic. Any AI reads and writes your memory over a standard interface. You approve what connects.
• Refuses to guess rather than inventing a confident answer.

Install

# requires Node 20+ and pnpm
git clone https://github.com/Whittle777/footnote.git
cd footnote && pnpm install && pnpm build
pnpm footnote onboard --minimal

Open source, MIT. Each atomic memory is called an engram, and every one carries its footnote.