CAIRN — the archivist's instrument

Welcome to CAIRN

Let's connect your knowledge.

Point CAIRN at any folder of notes or documents — an Obsidian vault, a project tree, a shared drive. It answers only what it can prove, with a citation for every claim and a receipt for every answer. It runs entirely on this machine; nothing leaves.

Looking for your vaults…

Cite-or-refuse — proof, or "Not in your vault" Receipts — a hash for every answer Integrity — score your whole corpus

Preferences

Knowledge

Connect a vault

Switch vaults, connect your Obsidian, or re-run the welcome tour.

Appearance

Theme

Daylight is the archivist's bench by day. Candlelit is the same archive after dark — deep walnut, parchment ink, brass by candlelight.

Masthead art

Answering

Answer strictness

How sure CAIRN must be before it answers instead of refusing. Higher = refuses more.

Default mode

What the box does when you open CAIRN.

Integrity

Stale after

Notes older than this with open tasks count as stale.

days

Contradiction sensitivity

How similar two notes must be to surface as a candidate.

File types

Which files CAIRN indexes. Word/PowerPoint/Excel and text extract cleanly; PDFs are best-effort — scanned or complex PDFs are flagged, not read.

Privacy

Fully local

Refuse any non-local model endpoint — nothing can phone home, even by misconfiguration.