What Nodez is

Nodez is a desktop app for keeping notes and code in one place, on your own machine, as ordinary files.

You point it at a folder of Markdown files - your vault. You can also point it at a code project. Nodez reads both, works out how everything connects, and gives you three things: a fast editor, a map of the connections, and a way to hand that map to an AI assistant.

It runs entirely on your computer. There is no Nodez account, no server holding your notes, and no subscription.

Why it was created#

Most note apps make storage feel magical. Your writing goes somewhere, sync happens somehow, and the arrangement works beautifully until the day you want your notes out, or the company changes its pricing, or the service shuts down.

Nodez starts from the opposite instinct: make storage boring and understandable. Your notes are files in a folder you picked. Sync is git, which has been doing this job for twenty years. Nothing is hidden in a database only this app can read.

The second reason is more recent. Once AI assistants became genuinely useful for thinking and building, a gap opened up: the assistant has no idea what you already know. Every conversation starts from nothing, and you spend it pasting in files and explaining context you have already written down somewhere. Meanwhile the actual answer - how these things relate - was never written down anywhere an assistant could reach.

Nodez was built to close that gap without giving up the first principle.

What it solves#

Your knowledge is scattered, and the connections are only in your head. Design decisions live in notes. The implementation lives in code. Which decision explains which module is something you just remember - until you don't. Nodez puts both in one graph so the connection is a thing you can see and follow.

Notes rot when you cannot see the shape of them. After a few hundred notes, folders stop helping. Nodez shows you the map: what is central, what is orphaned, which clusters formed on their own, and how any two notes connect.

Sync you cannot inspect is sync you cannot trust. Nodez does not invent a sync protocol. Your vault is a git repository; Nodez runs git on it and shows you what it is doing. When there is a conflict it stops and tells you rather than picking a winner quietly.

AI assistants are working blind. An assistant that cannot see your project gives you generic answers confidently. Giving it the map is what turns it from a better search engine into something that knows your actual work.

How it helps humans#

For the person doing the writing and building:

• Write in plain Markdown in a fast editor, with links, backlinks, tags and an outline - and keep files that any other tool can open
• See the shape of what you know, rather than scrolling a folder tree
• Follow a thread - trace how two ideas connect, or find everything that touches one file
• Keep code and notes side by side, so the reasoning and the implementation are one search away from each other
• Own the whole thing - it is a folder; back it up, move it, or walk away

How it helps agents#

For an AI assistant connected to Nodez over MCP - the standard protocol for connecting tools to assistants - the difference is that it can ask questions about your project instead of reading everything.

An assistant with a Nodez connection can:

• Search your notes and read only the ones that matter
• Query the graph - what links to this, what does this file import, what would be affected if this changed
• Trace relationships between a decision you wrote down and the code that implements it
• Write back to your vault when you ask it to - new notes, updates, links

Two things make this more than a search plugin. The first is that the graph distinguishes relationships it extracted from your files from ones it inferred, so an assistant can tell the difference between a fact and a guess. The second is that reading the map is far cheaper than reading the project - the assistant spends its attention on the few files that matter rather than filling up on everything.

Where the truth lives#

When your notes and your code disagree, Nodez has a clear answer about which one to believe:

• Code is what exists. For how something actually behaves today, the source wins.
• Notes are what you meant. For rationale, decisions and direction, your latest written decision wins.
• The graph is how things relate. It explains connections, and always says whether it extracted a link from your files or inferred it.

Where a disagreement touches something serious - architecture, security, or who owns your data - Nodez is meant to surface the conflict rather than resolve it silently.

What Nodez is not#

• Not a cloud service. No account, no server, no subscription.
• Not a database. Your files are the truth; everything else is rebuilt from them.
• Not an IDE. It reads your code to map it. It does not try to replace your editor.
• Not collaborative. No live multi-person editing. Sharing happens through git.
• Not finished. Nodez is in alpha. See What's next.