Curator
Curator is the knowledge plane under your personal knowledge system: any plain-markdown vault + one index database + MCP for agents + a deterministic librarian.
- Your notes stay plain files. A markdown+YAML directory under git is the whole canonical store; the plane's index is derived and disposable — rebuilt, never migrated. No plugin, no proprietary format, no live editor required. Bring your own viewer.
- Agents are first-class readers. One MCP entrypoint gives any agent search, retrieval, and relatedness over your whole corpus, citations included.
- Agents propose, you decide. The only write path is a validated, human-applied proposal. No tool anywhere in the surface writes your notes directly.
- The librarian is deterministic. Ranked, grouped digests of what's new against your current interests — zero LLM required; an agent harness is an optional prose enhancer.
Status: pre-release. Contracts v1 are published and stable; APIs around them are still settling. Not yet packaged — install is build-from-source (Quickstart).
The interactive TUI
curator review opens a tabbed terminal app over your vault: Review
proposals (coloured diff, a non-destructive pre-flight drift check,
apply/reject), Search the corpus (hybrid retrieval, open notes, related),
and preview or generate the librarian Digest.
Every screen, key, and the Search / Digest walkthroughs are in the CLI reference.
Where to start
| you want to | read |
|---|---|
| try it in under a minute | Quickstart |
| understand the design commitments | Concepts |
| plug in a reader, Zotero, or your own tool | Integrations |
| run it on a server, back it up, upgrade it | Operations |
| look something up | Configuration · CLI · MCP tools |
The four contracts
Everything that crosses the system boundary is one of four published contracts; everything else is internal and changes freely. Consumers pin versions; additive changes are minors, breaking changes are majors, each contract keeps its own changelog.
| contract | governs | spec |
|---|---|---|
kp-note/v1 | note identity + enrichment frontmatter | contracts/kp-note/v1.md |
kp-config/v1 | curator.toml configuration (legacy name kp.toml) | contracts/kp-config/v1.md |
proposals/v1 | the only agent write path | contracts/proposals/v1.md |
| MCP surface v1 | the agent tool surface | contracts/mcp/v1.md |
Any producer that writes conforming markdown+frontmatter into the vault is a valid producer — that sentence is the whole integration story. Write a producer spells it out; the sibling Curio reader and Zotero integrate exactly this way.
Source
Curator lives at
github.com/alexnodeland/curator.
This site is generated from the repo's docs/site/ sources — same
sources, same bytes, on every build.