dogfood

GNO

Search finds. GNO proves.

A local knowledge engine for your notes, code, PDFs, and Office docs. Hybrid search, a browsable workspace with graph and editor, CLI, SDK, REST API, and MCP for ten AI clients — plus retrieval that can show its work.

bun install -g @gmickel/gno
gno setup ~/notes --name notes     # returns only after retrieval actually works
gno skill install --target claude --scope user # choose your agent below
gno agents install --target claude # teach retrieval and writing discipline
gno agents verify --target claude

Custom fields such as project, approval status, and numeric confidence can constrain retrieval with typed metadata filters, across CLI, MCP, SDK, REST, and the Web UI.

What you get

One local index across everything you have. Markdown, PDFs, Office documents, plain text, source code, and portable mail, calendar and transcript exports. Point it at a folder that mixes all of them and it handles the mix.

Three ways to search it. Keyword (BM25), semantic (vector), and hybrid — fused, reranked, and explainable, with structured intent controls and metadata filters. Ask for "how we handle retries" and find the paragraph about exponential backoff that never uses the word.

A workspace, not a search box. Cross-collection folder tree, per-tab browse context, a markdown editor, provenance-carrying quick capture, and a navigable knowledge graph.

Answers with citations. Ask a question in natural language and get an answer built from your own documents, with citations that resolve to the source passage.

Six interfaces on one index. A fast CLI, a web UI, a REST API, a TypeScript SDK, an MCP server, and a headless daemon — plus one-command install into ten agent clients. Nothing drifts between them.

Optional hosted publishing at gno.sh when a slice needs a URL.

No GPU required, no account required, no telemetry. Free and MIT licensed.

Why not just another local RAG tool

The above is most of what people use day to day. Beyond it, four things here are different, and each one is measurable rather than adjectival:

Everything runs on your machine. Zero telemetry. The three network boundaries are explicit: downloading a model, configuring an HTTP inference endpoint, and uploading an artifact you exported for publishing.

And the receipts ship too. Every benchmark behind these numbers is committed to the repository against a pinned corpus, with its limitations stated alongside the result, so you can replay it rather than take it on trust.

Use it when

• your knowledge is split across Markdown, code, PDFs, Office files, and exported mail or transcripts
• you want one retrieval layer for the CLI, the browser, MCP, and a Bun/TypeScript SDK
• you want your coding agent to have a real memory without shipping your docs to a cloud API
• you want to search what you and your coding agents said in past sessions, kept apart from your curated notes
• you need to prove, later, which bytes supported a conclusion

Two minutes, end to end

# Install
bun install -g @gmickel/gno

# Activate a folder. Returns only after BM25 proves an exact corpus-derived hit;
# semantic embedding continues independently in the background.
gno setup ~/notes --name notes

# Connect your agent and teach the retrieval protocol (Claude shown)
gno skill install --target claude --scope user
gno agents install --target claude
gno agents verify --target claude

# Add more sources
gno collection add ~/work/docs --name work-docs --pattern "**/*.{md,pdf,docx}"
gno collection add ~/work/gno/src --name gno-code --pattern "**/*.{ts,tsx,js,jsx}"

# Tell retrieval what each collection is for
gno context add "work-docs:" "Architecture docs, runbooks, RFCs, meeting notes"

gno update --yes   # sync
gno embed          # embed when you want semantic retrieval

# Pick the search that fits the question
gno search "DEC-0054"                            # exact identifier
gno vsearch "retry failed jobs with backoff"     # natural language
gno query "JWT refresh token rotation" --explain # hybrid, with score traces

# Compile checkable evidence for a goal, then re-check it later
gno context build "why we dropped the queue rewrite" \
  --collection work-docs --budget 12000 --json --output capsule.json
gno context verify capsule.json

# Generate only what that evidence supports
gno ask "why did we drop the queue rewrite" --verify --show-sources

# Run the workspace (pick one — not both against the same index)
gno serve            # browser/desktop Web UI
gno daemon --detach  # headless indexing + resident MCP gateway

[!TIP] gno.sh/publish is live. Turn any GNO note or collection into a reader-first URL — editorial typography, scoped search, and four visibility modes from public to encrypted-before-upload. See the reader →

[!TIP] OpenClaw and Hermes Agent: Use GNO as a second brain or LLM wiki. Install the skill and retrieval