hephaestus

A personal context management system — a single, self-hosted Rust application that fuses a wiki-style knowledge base (Zettelkasten) with task management. Notes and tasks are first-class, cross-linkable entities in one database, so a task like "Fix the roof leak" stays coupled to the home-repair log and contractor-call notes that give it context.

It is offline-first: fully useful on a laptop with no network, and (when the distributed layer lands) auto-syncing to a central instance hosted in blumeops. The primary surface will be a Neovim plugin (heph.nvim, an obsidian.nvim replacement); a CLI (heph) is the utility/scripting surface.

Why "what is next?" is the flagship. heph is organized around concise, honest answers to recurring questions — above all "what do I do right now?" — built from ~10 years of the owner's lived prioritization discipline: projects-as-contexts; attention colors (white/orange/red/blue, where red = a consequence exists if late, not importance); do-dates, not due-dates (earliest-actionable, never a deadline alarm); and working-set tensions surfaced honestly (no "fake happy", no overwhelm).

See docs/explanation/design.md for the vision and rationale, and docs/reference/tech-spec.md for the implementation-facing specification.

Status

Phase 1 (v1 prototype) — in progress on branch feature/v1-prototype. The local-only system is feature-complete and the offline-sync merge engine converges; remaining work is the network transport, auth, and the Neovim plugin. Built test-first (102 tests at last update). The canonical tracker is tech-spec §14.

Area	State
Data model, markdown extraction, wiki-links, export	✅ done
Tasks, links, "what is next?" ranking, recurrence, per-task logs	✅ done
hephd daemon — local mode (file lock + JSON-RPC over a unix socket)	✅ done
heph CLI; list / health / journal / full-text search (FTS5)	✅ done
Sync engine — HLC, op-log, converging merge + conflict queue (no network yet)	✅ done
yrs text-CRDT for body merge	⏳ next
server/client modes + network push/pull sync	⏳
OIDC/Authentik auth + per-user isolation	⏳
heph.nvim (primary surface)	⏳

Architecture

A Cargo workspace, layered so the same core runs from a laptop to a hub:

• crates/heph-core — the library: data model, the Store trait + SQLite store, markdown parsing/extraction, recurrence, the "what is next?" engine, and the sync engine (op-log, hybrid logical clocks, CRDT/LWW merge, conflict detection). Synchronous and clock-injected (no ambient wall-clock reads) so ranking and merge are deterministic.
• crates/hephd — the per-device daemon. One binary, three modes — local (own SQLite replica), server (also a network endpoint + sync hub), client (thin, remote) — selected by configuration via a targetable Store backend. Surfaces connect to it over a unix socket; it owns the DB handle and (later) background sync.
• crates/heph — the CLI: a thin client of the daemon (no direct DB access).
• heph.nvim/ (planned) — the Neovim plugin, the primary editing/agenda surface.

Storage: SQLite is the source of truth; a node's body is markdown; export materializes the whole store as a directory of .md files. Sync: each device holds a full replica + an append-only op-log; devices reconcile through a hub with automatic merge (text-CRDT bodies, last-writer-wins scalars, OR-set links) and a conflict queue for the ambiguous remainder. Auth (planned): OIDC against Authentik, with per-user isolation.

Build & run

Requires a Rust toolchain (stable). The build is a standard Cargo workspace:

cargo build              # build all crates
cargo test --all         # run the full test suite
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

Run the daemon in local mode, then drive it with the CLI:

# Terminal 1 — start the daemon (creates ~/.local/share/heph/heph.db and a socket)
cargo run -p hephd

# Terminal 2 — talk to it
cargo run -p heph -- task "Fix the roof leak" --attention red
cargo run -p heph -- next                 # the "what is next?" ranking
cargo run -p heph -- doc "Roof log" --body "Called the contractor."
cargo run -p heph -- search roof          # full-text search
cargo run -p heph -- journal 2026-06-01   # open/create today's journal
cargo run -p heph -- export ./snapshot    # write the store as a .md tree

The daemon takes an exclusive lock on its DB file; --db and --socket override the defaults.

Development

• Test-driven. Every feature has tests at the appropriate layer(s) — unit, property tests, real-socket daemon integration, and CLI process tests. No feature is "done" without them.
• Change process. Changes are classified C0 / C1 / C2 (quick fix / human-review PR / Mikado chain). The v1 prototype is a single long-lived C1. See docs/how-to/agent-change-process.md.
• Git hooks & tooling. prek runs formatting, linting, and secret detection; mise runs repo automation; CI (Forgejo) runs prek plus cargo fmt/clippy/test via .forgejo/scripts/build.

prek install && prek install --hook-type commit-msg   # set up hooks
prek run --all-files                                  # run all checks
mise tasks                                            # list automation tasks
mise run ai-docs                                      # docs AI agents read first

• Documentation is Diataxis-structured and built with Quartz; changelog fragments use Towncrier under docs/changelog.d/. Working agents should read AGENTS.md first.

Repository layout

./Cargo.toml            # workspace manifest
./crates/heph-core/     # core library: model, store, extraction, recurrence, ranking, sync
./crates/hephd/         # daemon: local mode (JSON-RPC over a unix socket); server/client planned
./crates/heph/          # CLI: thin client of the daemon
./heph.nvim/            # Neovim plugin (planned)
./docs/                 # Diataxis docs (design, tech-spec, how-to), Quartz config
./.forgejo/             # CI build + release workflows and hooks
./.dagger/              # Dagger module backing docs builds/releases
./mise-tasks/           # repo automation via `mise run`

License

All rights reserved. This is a personal, private project — not licensed for use, copying, modification, or distribution. Open-sourcing may be considered in the future. See LICENSE.