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FAQ

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Only if you choose a cloud AI provider and the notes involved are not marked private. Search and the graph run entirely locally. With a local provider such as Ollama, everything stays on your machine.

Even with a cloud provider configured, you can mark notes or folders private — those are blocked from being read, embedded, or sent to any untrusted provider. See the privacy model.

Worth knowing before you start:

  • Quality depends on the model. Models vary in reasoning, tool use, and embedding quality, so results differ between them.
  • Quality depends on your vault. Answers improve when notes are well-structured and each covers a coherent topic. Notes mixing many unrelated subjects retrieve poorly.
  • The assistant can be wrong. If relevant notes don’t exist, or the model misreads them, you’ll get an unsatisfying answer. Rephrasing the query or describing the context in more detail usually helps.

Use the most capable model your provider offers — agent quality depends heavily on reasoning and tool-use ability. For a fully local setup, pair a capable Ollama chat model with a strong embedding model such as mxbai-embed-large.

Yes. Response quality varies with the model and the language it reasons in, and strong multilingual embedding models give the best retrieval results. More UI translations are on the way.

How does it differ from Smart Connections?

Section titled “How does it differ from Smart Connections?”

Both aim at AI-assisted knowledge work; the approach differs:

  • Completely open source
  • Local models via Ollama with no license required
  • A tool-using agent that searches, reads, runs Dataview/JS, and stages note edits — rather than a fixed RAG pipeline
  • Hybrid retrieval — vector plus lexical — and lexical search works with no embedding model configured at all
  • A Smart Graph view and a skills system for extending the agent

Currently in progress:

  • Similar-note connections view improvements
  • Predictive note placement
  • More UI languages