The Library

The Library is where what you read and what your agents find lands, and where a librarian turns it into something you will actually go back to. You never manage files. You add a source; a wiki updates; when a topic moves, an editorial appears on the front page.

Seven kinds of thing

Object	What it is	Rule
Source	Anything captured: a link, a paste, a PDF, a screenshot, a meeting, a book file. Kept whole, with who filed it and when.	Sources are evidence. They are never edited by the librarian.
Topic	A shelf. Holds its sources, its wiki, its editorials, and your own notes and stance.	Active topics rise; quiet stubs settle into a dormant section. A finished reference topic with a real wiki is never "dead".
Wiki page	What the librarian compiles from a topic's sources, one page per concept, cross-linked, every claim footnoted to a source.	Rewritten when sources change. You never edit it by hand; you ask for a recompile with an instruction.
Editorial	A numbered essay with a point of view, written when a topic moves or when you give the librarian your angle.	Never more than one a night across the Library.
Person	A page for someone who keeps appearing in your sources and meetings.	Anyone seen in two separate sources gets one automatically.
Book	A page for a book you have read, plus its mirror: each section read against your own record.	See People and Books.
The Desk	Your review queue.	Anything that would change your record waits here for a yes.

The front page (the Press)

Open the Library and you land on the front page, newest first: editorials at the top, wiki changes below, sources beneath. A strip under the masthead tells you what is waiting for you (proposed editorials, your reading list) and what arrived from your research agents this week.

Filters: Everything / Editorials / Wiki / Sources, Personal / Work, Everyone / Mine / Agents (who captured it), Saved, and Unread first. Every row is labelled by lane so you always know whether you are looking at a wiki page, an editorial, or a source, and sources show who filed them ("via Hermes", "via librarian:research", "via you").

Search

The search field in the masthead is on every Library page; on a keyboard, / jumps to it. Results are grouped into Editorials, Wiki, and Sources, each with a snippet, plus a row of matching Topics, People, and Books. Matching is by meaning as well as words: "why I keep freezing" finds the editorial about the freeze response even if it never uses that word. It is the same search your agents use.

Getting sources in

+ Add source is on every Library page and has six tabs:

Link. An article or a YouTube video. The page text or transcript is fetched and kept.
Paste. Any text: a note, an article body, a transcript.
Files. PDFs, Markdown, and images, several at once; a screenshot is transcribed so its text is searchable and citable.
Book. A book file becomes a Book page (see People and Books).
Meeting. Notes or a transcript with the attendees. Known people autocomplete; new names get pages. Decisions the librarian finds in the notes arrive on the Desk as proposals.
Research. A question, how many sources to find (5, 8, or 12), and a topic. The librarian searches the web, prefers primary material and diverse stances, and files what it finds into the topic with the reason each source matters. It runs in the background and takes one to two minutes; the topic page updates as sources land.

You can pick a topic or leave it to the librarian. Unfiled captures land in the Inbox, where the librarian files confidently on its own, suggests when unsure, and holds anything ambiguous for you.

Sources also arrive without you: from the Chrome extension (save the page you are on), from a highlighted line in your Journal, and from any agent you have connected over MCP, always marked with the agent's name.

What the librarian does

The librarian is scheduled code, not an assistant you have to remember to prompt. Every night it:

Distills each new source into a summary.
Compiles topics that moved into wiki pages, footnoting every claim.
Writes an editorial where one is due, according to the topic's editorial mode.
Builds and updates people pages, and proposes new ones.
Keeps the timeline and, on Mondays, writes a short reflection of the week.
Flags its own doubts on the Desk: a source that looks misfiled, a topic that should split, a stub that has gone quiet.

During the day it works on request: Research this on a topic page, New editorial from this on any piece, Recompile or Tweak on any wiki page, and Mirror on a book.

Editorials

Three ways an editorial gets written:

The topic moved. Each topic has an editorial mode in its settings. Propose (the default) files a proposal on the Desk when the wiki has clearly moved past its last editorial; you say yes. Automatic writes it and tells you, at most once per topic every two weeks. Off never suggests one.
You give it your angle. On any wiki page, editorial, or source, New editorial from this opens a composer. Write the angle in your own words; the librarian argues it, starting from the piece you were reading. Tick Research the web while writing for outside sources cited inline, or File new sources first to have it find and file up to eight sources before writing. The angle itself is kept in your record as an original, because it is your thinking.
You ask in words. In the Ask box on any piece, write "write an editorial on this, arguing that…". The librarian confirms the angle in two sentences and offers a Write the editorial button. One tap files it through the same path as the composer.

Editorials land on the front page and under the topic's Editorials tab within a few minutes.

Reading

Wiki pages and editorials render as a reading room: clean typography, cross-links within the topic, citations you can open to see the original source. Every piece has Save for later (a reading list, no reason required), Ask about this, Make it a task, and Download .md, a clean Markdown file with provenance built in.

Source pages have four lenses: the distilled Summary, the full-text Reader, a grounded Chat, and Cited in (which wiki pages draw on it).

Ask

Every Library page has an Ask box. Answers come from your sources and wiki pages with citations, scoped to the piece, the topic, a book, or the whole Library. Add web results lets the librarian fill gaps from the web, cited by URL and clearly marked. Good answers can be saved back as sources. Conversations are kept per piece, so reopening an editorial shows what you were discussing; the ones you mark Keep stay, and the librarian distills the rest into proposals overnight.

The Desk, and why it stays short

The first version of the Desk drowned its owner: five hundred items in a week. So it has rules, and the rules are the product.

A proposal that is not answered in 14 days expires. Silence is a no.
Editorials are proposed once per topic per two weeks, and only for topics whose mode allows it.
A misfile is flagged only after the librarian has missed it three compiles running; imports and daily briefs are never flagged.
A quiet-topic flag only ever targets stubs (two wiki pages or fewer). Answers stick: "keep" holds for six months.
People are proposed after two separate sources; Make pages for all accepts the batch.
Decisions an agent believes you made arrive as proposals in your words, with the source. Accepting one can retire the one it replaces.

Activity

Every background job, compiles, editorials, research runs, nightly passes, is listed under Activity with status, duration, and any error. If something you asked for did not appear, this is where to look.

What it isn't

Not a CRM: people pages are for people you keep encountering. Not a memory store for agents alone: Mem0, Zep, and gbrain go deeper on graphs and scale; the Library is the half where the owner reads and decides. And not free of reading: if you never open the front page, the editorials are cost without value. The Sunday habit is the product.

Updated 2026-09-27 · All chapters · API reference