A memory palace
for the work you actually do.
Twelve parts make VAULT what it is. Each section below comes with a real visual from the app — so you see what the feature looks like, not just what it promises.
Your archive laid out in three dimensions.
Every file lives on a 3D plane where depth is time: the present sits close to the camera, last year recedes into the distance, five years ago is a soft glow at the far horizon. Folder clusters stay in fixed angular positions, so the geometry is stable — the same file always sits in the same place.
- ●LexoRank Z-position on a logarithmic scale (8 units per day)
- ●Folder islands with stable hashed angles — your vault has a shape
- ●Depth-of-field focuses the active temporal plane, rest softly blur
- ●Adaptive LOD auto-tunes to the frame rate your Mac holds
- ●Mouse wheel, timeline scrubber, or voice command to scrub through time
Type what you remember. Find what you meant.
Every file becomes a 768-dimension vector via a local embedding model. Search is a geometric distance, not a filename match — 'the pink brand deck from Q4' surfaces the right file, even if it's called DRAFT_final_v7b.pdf.
- ●Model: nomic-embed-text (274 MB), 100% on-device
- ●Cosine similarity 0–1 drives both the ranked list and the node glow in 3D
- ●Total mode searches the whole vault · Focus mode scopes to a time range
- ●Covers text, PDFs, images (via AI captions), audio (via transcripts)
- ●Live unindexed counter so you know when results are complete
Every file has a reason you saved it.
On ingest, a small local LLM classifies each file into one of four creative intents. Your archive stops being a list of things and becomes a map of your creative process — filter by intent, combine with time, drill into any moment of your practice.
Raw references you gathered — inspiration, screenshots, bookmarks.
Material you studied — papers, articles, videos, notes.
Work you produced — drafts, sketches, unfinished pieces.
Finals you shipped — decks, pitches, published work.
- ●Classified by Qwen 2.5 or Gemma 3 — runs on your Apple Silicon
- ●Intent filter pills in the HUD hide/show each category instantly
- ●Intent is stored in node metadata alongside tags and date
- ●Drives both visual colour in 3D and the Insights dashboard
The connections between files, made visible.
A 3D knowledge graph where files are nodes and their relationships are glowing laser beams. An LLM discovers five distinct kinds of links — and 'bridge' nodes (connected to 3+ intent groups) are auto-flagged as the rare files that tie your practice together.
- ●Five edge types: semantic · temporal · causal · bridge · intentional
- ●Each edge carries a 0–1 strength — weak links dim, strong links glow
- ●Bridge nodes surfaced automatically from the intent graph
- ●Graph cached in SQLite's VaultConnection table — instant on reopen
- ●Bezier-curve rendering keeps the 3D web legible at any zoom
Your creative practice as a dashboard.
VAULT looks at your whole vault over time and surfaces patterns about how you actually work: when you're prolific, when you're idle, which themes dominate, whether you harvest or make more, which files are outliers, how your mood shifts by quarter.
- ●Bursts · prolific periods auto-detected (3+ files clustered on a theme)
- ●Intent mix · harvest/digest/make/propose ratios charted month by month
- ●Rhythm · 365-day heatmap, current streak, longest streak, longest pause
- ●Outliers · the files with lowest avg similarity — your most singular ideas
- ●Mood evolution · 'vibes' from AI analysis plotted across quarters
Pick ten files. Get a structured brief in seconds.
Multi-select any scatter of references, drafts and notes, and VAULT synthesises them into a brief: emerging themes, tensions, open questions, the mood board they imply. Clean markdown, ready to send. Bilingual (IT/EN).
- ●Minimal brand language with emerald accent
- ●Archive as spatial experience, not folder tree
- ●Clinical minimalism vs. emotional warmth
- ●Technical precision vs. approachable tone
- ●How do we visualise 'time' without a calendar UI?
- ●What's the right level of AI visibility?
- ●Nocturnal · precise · quietly ambitious
- ●Multi-select any set of nodes from the canvas
- ●Synthesis via Claude — the one moment VAULT optionally steps outside your Mac
- ●Feature is opt-in per use; disable it and the app is fully offline
- ●Output structure: themes · contradictions · open questions · tone
Navigate without a mouse.
Turn on your webcam and VAULT tracks your hand in 3D at ~30 fps. Pinch to click, open palm to pan, fist to home, double-pinch to double-click. A One Euro Filter smooths the cursor so sensor noise doesn't become mis-selections.
- ●MediaPipe Hands — 21 landmarks per hand, real time
- ●One Euro Filter kills jitter without adding perceptible lag
- ●Pinch hysteresis: click at 3 cm, release at 7.5 cm — no accidental taps
- ●Safe zone around the home button prevents mis-navigation mid-gesture
- ●Toggle with the J key or the lightsaber button in the HUD
Talk to your archive.
Press V, say what you want. 'Vai al 5 marzo' flies the camera to March 5. 'Search for brand work' runs a semantic query. 'What connects these three files?' kicks off a synthesis. The parser routes to navigation, search, analysis, or an answer — in Italian or English.
- ●Activation: V key or voice button in the HUD
- ●Live transcription streamed via Claude
- ●Intent parser: navigate · search · analyze · ui_command · question
- ●Multi-language: IT / EN auto-detected from the speech
- ●Dispatches through the same controller as mouse and touchless
Preview anything without leaving the canvas.
Click a node and it unfurls into a full-screen preview inside the 3D scene — with the right player for each type. PDFs get a page-flip reader, videos get scrubber controls, audio shows a waveform, images support pinch-to-zoom with EXIF.
- ●PDF · multi-page reader (PDF.js) with keyboard navigation
- ●Video · HTML5 scrubber, play/pause, frame-accurate seek
- ●Audio · waveform + transport
- ●Image · zoom, pan, EXIF panel (camera · date · location)
- ●LRU cache caps live previews at 50 textures — memory stays tight
A notebook for every file.
Each file carries a dossier — a side panel with title, date, intent badge, tags, AI-generated description, and a rich-text notes editor that auto-saves. Annotate references, track tensions, keep the questions you want to answer.
Brand Strategy Q4 — Acme Corp
A 48-page strategy deck framing a rebrand from clinical to emotional. Tone shifts between sober and aspirational; the pink accent recurs across mockups.
- ●Auto-save with 2-second debounce — no save button, no lost work
- ●AI description + vibes + tensions + open questions per file
- ●Re-analyse button regenerates the AI description with a fresh pass
- ●Tags extracted automatically, user-editable
- ●Star any file as 'important' → highlighted in timeline + search
Drop a file into the folder. It's in the vault.
A Chokidar watcher follows your chosen vault folder and catches every add, move, rename and delete. New files get metadata extraction, thumbnail generation, and an AI pass queued within a second of the write settling.
- ●Types: PDF · MP4 / MOV · MP3 / M4A · PNG / JPG / HEIC · MD · URL shortcuts
- ●1-second write-stability threshold prevents partial-file pickups
- ●EXIF extraction on images feeds the dossier (camera · date · location)
- ●Thumbnails: PDF first page · video frame at 1 s · image resize
- ●DB self-heals on startup: deleted files are pruned automatically
The brain lives on your machine.
Every non-optional AI call runs through Ollama on your Apple Silicon chip. On first launch VAULT detects your RAM and picks a model tier automatically. You can switch tiers at any time.
- ●Text: Qwen 2.5 (1.5B / 7B) or Gemma 3 variants
- ●Embedding: nomic-embed-text (274 MB)
- ●Vision (Pro tier): LLaVA 7B / 13B for image understanding
- ●Batch queue with 3-retry back-off so flaky GPU states don't drop files
- ●Optional cloud fallback (Claude / GPT-4o / Gemini) — opt-in per feature
Your vault, opened by a combination.
A forthcoming feature: publish any vault and hand someone a combination — 12 characters, segmented in three groups of four. Type them in, the vault opens in their browser, read-only. No install, no account. You keep the key, you revoke it whenever you want. Pricing scales with the size of what you're publishing.
- ●One combination per published vault — a short, shareable 12-character code
- ●Recipients open the vault in any modern browser — no install, no sign-up
- ●Access is read-only — your local writes never sync back from the shared copy
- ●Revoke a combination any time; it becomes invalid instantly
- ●Monthly fee scales with the storage size of the published vault
- ●Roadmap — the feature is not yet shipped; details will firm up before launch
Built on open tools you already trust.
No proprietary black boxes. Every piece of the stack is either Apple-native, open-source, or replaceable.
Compute
Apple Silicon
Local AI runtime
Ollama
Reasoning
Qwen 2.5 · Gemma 3
Embeddings
nomic-embed-text
Vision (Pro)
LLaVA
Memory store
SQLite (FTS5)
3D canvas
Three.js · R3F
App shell
Electron · Next.js
Touchless
MediaPipe Hands
Folder watcher
Chokidar
Document preview
PDF.js
Optional · opt-in
Claude API
Ready to remember everything?
Free for macOS, Apple Silicon required. Every feature above is already in the build.