I — The Promise

Basalt reads your notes and tells you what you're really working on.

A second-brain compiler. It walks your Markdown vault, indexes the structure, and surfaces what you believe but never wrote down. Local-first. MIT-licensed. Compiles you, not the corpus.

install github

II — The Verbs

Five elements, five questions about your own work.

11 Na

Implicit Thesis

Sodium

The through-line you keep seasoning your work with — named, not just clustered.

17 Cl

Contradiction

Chlorine

Two notes that disagree with each other. Quietly. For months.

80 Hg

Drift

Mercury

Projects whose meaning slid sideways while you were busy maintaining them.

6 C

Connection

Carbon

Two notes you wrote months apart that turn out to be the same idea.

79 Au

Buried Insight

Gold

The line you wrote in 2022 that your work this week keeps mining without knowing it.

III — A Real Brief

Anonymized output from a 2,400-note vault.

The format below is what basalt brief writes. No charts, no dashboards — a one-page Markdown artifact you can paste into the same vault it came from. 

# Basalt Brief — 2026-05-11

## I. Implicit Thesis
> The work I keep returning to is **interpretability of agent
> behavior at the level of artifacts** — not benchmarks, not
> activations, but the durable text agents leave behind.

confidence: 0.78 (3 of 5 falsification rules satisfied)

## II. Contradiction
- 2024-08-14 `agents/loop-design.md`: "tools must always be
  idempotent — retries are the path of least surprise"
- 2026-04-02 `agents/scratch.md`: "we now require side-effecting
  tools for the planner to make progress"

## III. Drift
- `projects/basalt-port/index.md` (founded 2025-12-08) opened as a
  build log; the last 14 entries are reflections on what to leave
  behind. The artifact has become the journal.

## IV. Connection
- 2023-11-02 `reading/sennett-craftsman.md`
- 2026-03-19 `agents/operating-manual.md`
Both circle the same claim: that the rituals you build around
the work are the work.

## V. Buried Insight
- 2022-06-04 `fragments.md` line 41
- referenced (without citation) in 3 notes from the last 60 days.
IV — The Demo

basalt demo against the bundled fixture.

A 45-second recording lands here before launch. Until then: 

$ basalt init
===== basalt init =====
indexed 12 notes · 38 sentences · 9 links
embeddings: ok (nomic-embed-text · 768d · 12/12)

$ basalt brief
===== basalt brief · 2026-05-11 =====
Implicit Thesis     · 1 found · confidence 0.78
Contradiction       · 2 found
Drift               · 1 found
Connection          · 3 found
Buried Insight      · 1 found
wrote 2026-05-11-brief.md (1.4 KB)
V — The Promise (technical)

What we do not do.

No network in Open tier.

The CLI, plugin, MCP, and desktop run entirely on your machine. Ollama if you want embeddings, BYOK if you want a hosted LLM. Nothing else.

Read-only on your vault.

Basalt never modifies the files it finds. Promote-to-note creates new files only; an architectural test in the codebase enforces this.

No methodology imposed.

Your folder structure, your tags, your linking habits — Basalt does not care. It compiles the corpus you already have.

VI — Surfaces

Run it wherever you already read.

CLI npm

npm i -g basalted
basalt init && basalt brief

Obsidian plugin

Community Plugin: basalt

MCP server npm

claude mcp add basalt -- npx -y basalted-mcp
VII — Pricing

Three tiers. Honest defaults.

Open

$0

  • CLI · Plugin · MCP · Desktop
  • BYOK to any provider
  • Local Ollama embeddings
  • MIT-licensed, forever

Pro

$12/mo

  • Hosted brief generation
  • Vault Sync (E2EE)
  • Web cockpit
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe

Founder

$240

  • One-time. Lifetime Pro.
  • First 200 only
  • Name in CHANGELOG
  • Direct line to the build
Become a founder