NoteSprite

NoteSprite is a vault-native AI agent for Obsidian that helps power users manage program, project, and meeting notes using a wizard-generated ontology. This includes folders, templates, and frontmatter conventions tailored to how you work, and compounds knowledge over time by updating entities within the ontology.

Who this is for

NoteSprite is built for solo power users who want:

• A consistent structure for projects, meetings, decisions, risks, and assumptions (with optional concepts like objectives and themes)
• A "deep work" system for sensemaking and executive-ready outputs — not a task manager
• Safe AI-assisted note creation and refactoring with reviewable diffs and rollback
• Compounding over time: weekly and monthly synthesis driven by deltas, not repetition

Who this is not for

NoteSprite is not currently aimed at:

• Team collaboration or multiple authors in a single vault
• Task management, reminders, or general project management tasks
• Unstructured note vaults, or vaults where the structure is not important

What it does

Wizard-generated vault ontology

The setup wizard asks about your role, domain, and ways of working, then generates a vault structure, templates, and conventions that match your preferences. There are three entry modes:

• Start fresh — generate a new ontology from scratch
• Evolve existing — rerun the wizard against your current ontology to adjust policies, evolve structure, or rebuild fresh
• Adopt existing vault — analyse an established vault and generate an ontology that matches what you already have

The wizard is adaptive. When your work changes — a new domain, a different structural preference — you rerun it, pick a mode, and review the proposed diffs before anything is written.

Task-driven agent UI

A single primary view (typically pinned to the right panel) presents Task Cards as the entry point. The core workflows are:

• Assistant — general vault-aware chat and ad-hoc queries
• Capture & Reconcile — meeting notes or documents turned into structured notes and entity updates
• Review / Brief — structured intelligence brief from vault content, with citations
• Populate Ontology — interview-driven bootstrap to create initial ontology instances

Additional tasks — Identify Risks, Prep for Meeting, Weekly Synthesis, Monthly Review — are contract-derived and adapt to your vault ontology. Tasks can be contract-defined prompt-based skills or richer UI workflows.

Local-first indexing with citations

NoteSprite indexes your vault into a local SQLite database using sql.js. It uses hybrid retrieval (lexical search plus lightweight embeddings) and responses can include heading-level citations back to your notes. Everything stays local.

Safe writes: propose, approve, rollback

The agent never silently edits your vault. All writes go to a Proposal Buffer and accumulate in a collapsible queue. You review diffs, approve selected or all changes, and can rollback by run ID. Deletes are supported but explicitly gated by policy.

Change over time

Runs can produce delta artefacts stored under the plugin system directory. Entity notes maintain a Timeline section driven by policy. Weekly and monthly review tasks aggregate those deltas to surface what changed — what's new, what's stabilising, what's fading, which assumptions have been challenged, and which risks are intensifying or weakening.

How it works

• Home / Agent View — task cards, home sections (past chats, recent changes, suggested next actions), streaming output, proposal queue, and activity trace
• Vault Contract — a versioned contract generated by the wizard and stored in the plugin directory, defining enabled entity types, paths, templates, frontmatter conventions, timeline and delta policies, the task catalogue, and write safety boundaries
• Indexing — heading-level chunking plus lightweight embeddings into local SQLite
• Tasks — outcome-oriented definitions that parameterise prompt, retrieval, and output destinations
• Tools — ontology-aware operations that enforce the contract and safety policy, with subagent delegation for context-heavy work (research, entity scanning, patch QA)
• Patch engine — apply with snapshot plus rollback, with run artefacts stored on disk

Adopting an existing vault

If you already have an established vault with its own folder structure, naming conventions, and templates, the Adopt existing vault wizard mode generates a NoteSprite ontology and contract that matches what you already have — rather than starting from scratch and reorganising your notes.

The process is conservative by design:

1. Vault scan — a read-only pass collecting folder statistics, naming patterns, frontmatter keys, heading structures, link patterns, and template signals. No note body content is read; only structural metadata is analysed.
2. AI-assisted inference — scan results pass through deterministic heuristics and an AI analysis step that infers entity types from structural metadata. Only metadata is sent to the model — never note body content.
3. Confirm inferences — you review inferred entity mappings (each with a confidence level and human-readable evidence) and enable, disable, or adjust them. Preflight validation prevents duplicate entity IDs or paths.
4. Contract proposal — NoteSprite generates a vault contract, tool manifest, and (when applicable) preserves policy defaults from any existing contract. The proposal appears as a reviewable diff set — nothing is written until you approve.
5. Migration plan — an optional step that creates missing folders, merges NoteSprite frontmatter into existing templates (rather than overwriting), and adds artefact directories. You choose between contract-only or templates-and-missing-folders.
6. Apply — contract, migration, and any drift-repair patches combine into a single proposal for one-click approval.

Setup

NoteSprite requires an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), or Google (Gemini). Keys are stored securely via Obsidian SecretStorage and are never written to vault files. You can configure one or more providers in NoteSprite settings.

Install from the Obsidian Community Plugins store (once published), or build from source. On first run, open the NoteSprite view, add at least one provider API key, and choose a setup path: start fresh with the wizard, or adopt an existing vault.

Workflow examples

Capture a meeting and update entities

After a meeting, open Capture & Reconcile, paste your notes or add attachments, and configure processing options. NoteSprite produces a structured meeting note, updates relevant entity notes (projects, decisions, risks, assumptions, people), appends timeline entries, and stores delta artefacts for later synthesis. You review every proposed change as a diff before approving.

Generate an intelligence brief

Before a governance forum or when you need a structured summary, choose Review / Brief. Describe the scope and time window, and NoteSprite produces a brief structured around Situation, So What, Next Best Actions, and Citations — all drawn from vault content with heading-level provenance.

Weekly synthesis

At the end of the week, run Weekly Synthesis scoped to your portfolio, program, or project. The output is structured around your enabled ontology: what's new, what's stabilising, what's fading, assumptions challenged, and risks shifting. The synthesis is driven by accumulated deltas rather than re-reading everything from scratch.

Evolve your ontology safely

When your work changes, rerun the wizard. Choose from adjusting policies only, evolving the folder and template structure, or a fresh rebuild that proposes archiving the existing structure. Every change surfaces as a reviewable diff — nothing is written silently.