The core idea was that I've always been a lousy notetaker, even going back to my school days years ago. I'm great at one-off and one-liner notes and occasionally more in-depth notes, but tend to not flesh them out fully enough to make them worth re-visiting.

This has been a struggle even as an engineer sitting in meetings or trying to absorb new information when starting a new job and ramping up.

Logbook is meant to use an interaction paradigm we as engineers are using very often these days: it's a terminal UI in the vein of Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.

It's targeted at the entry of free-flowing thoughts but you can also write longer notes by launching your default shell editor from within the tool.

Each note is saved as markdown with some metadata and that metadata is then saved to a local SQLite DB.

For the LLM side, the tool extracts useful metadata from those notes and then performs some local ranking/categorization. It then has the ability to send a note or some metadata to a provider of your choosing (it's straightforward to use OpenAI or something more broad and customizable like OpenRouter) for further enrichment or filtering.

A couple examples of the currently implemented slash-commands: `/related` can be used to find related notes; say you've been scribbling down notes about OAuth or MCP servers and want to gather up the most relevant notes to one of those topics. Or you can use a `/gaps` command that'll help you find things you've taken notes about but without properly defining or providing context around them (i.e. you mention ID-JAG for OAuth but never actually say what ID-JAG is, this command will tell you this so you have a chance to review what you previously wrote and can then define exactly what that keyword is about).

It's still very much a work in progress. It's not meant to be a full-fledged note-taking app a la Obsidian or anything like that. I've just always preferred taking notes in markdown or plain text and this is a great way to continue doing that while also making enrichment of the notes pretty simple.

You may ask "why not just use agent memories?" I don't really like the idea of tightly coupling notes with codebases or agents and I don't find the current UX very intuitive at least for the way I prefer to take notes.

[0] - https://github.com/joshwertheim/logbook/