03 / Memory
Every note and summary lives as plain markdown files on your Mac, indexed locally and full text searchable. Meeting transcripts, routine outputs and clipboard history live in a local database next to them. No vendor database holding your notes, and nothing to export if you leave. Just your knowledge, portable forever. We compared that approach against the best second brain apps.
Mission Control
Every note becomes a node, and every link becomes a thread between them. Watch how your projects, clients, meetings, and daily logs actually connect around a single MEMORY index, so you can spot what matters and jump straight to it. It is your whole second brain drawn out, and it lives on your Mac as files you keep.
Plain markdown · SQLite FTS5 · yours to keep
New: an Obsidian-like workspace
A file tree on the left, your note open in the middle, and backlinks on the right. Every note is a plain markdown file in a folder you picked, and the links are normal markdown links, so the same vault opens in Obsidian or any editor you already use. This is the whole second brain your assistant reads from, living on your Mac.
File tree · markdown links · backlinks · on your Mac
Claude reaches an Obsidian vault a different way, through the Obsidian Local REST API community plugin plus the third-party mcp-obsidian server, not through Routines. We started it on a Mac on 2026-08-03 and it listed all 12 tools, without completing an authenticated call: the Obsidian MCP server.
Build it out
Add a note or a folder right in the tree and organize your knowledge the way you think. A new folder appears the moment you name it, and a new note opens ready to write. Everything you add becomes a real file on disk that your routines can read from the next time they run.
One click to add · real files on disk
Settings → Workspace
Routines reads your raw notes, meetings, and files overnight and keeps a MEMORY.md plus per-folder index catalogs up to date, so your assistant can find what matters fast. Leave the nightly pass on, pick the time, or hit Index now whenever you want. The pass itself runs on your Mac, and the notes it reads go to the model to be summarized, through Routines AI or straight to your provider on your own key.
Nightly re-index · on by default · runs on your Mac
New: capture anything
Paste a URL, a PDF, or a few lines of text, or share straight from your phone, and Routines pulls the whole thing into your vault. It reads regular articles, and it reads X posts and long-form X Articles in full, the ones that come back empty in every normal scraper. Then the same pass that files a dropped file gives you a TL;DR, key points, and tags, and lets you ask questions about it. The note it writes is a plain markdown file in your own folder.
real capture · shared from the X app
Library · Capture
saved locallyTL;DR
A long-form argument that agents you run on your own machine, on your own model key, beat cloud agents on trust, cost, and staying power.
Key points
Posts · articles · PDFs · links · all indexed on your Mac
New: Reddit threads
Paste a Reddit post link on your Mac, or share a post from the Reddit app on your iPhone, and Routines pulls the real thread in. Reddit hands a generic scraper an empty JavaScript shell, so Routines asks Reddit's own public endpoints for the post instead (on the phone, through Routines when your own network cannot reach Reddit). What lands in your library is markdown: the post body, then a Comments section with each reply as u/author and their words, and replies to replies usually arrive as quoted lines. Up to 200 comments and 40,000 characters of them, and if the thread runs longer the note ends by telling you how many more are still on Reddit.
The Library capture box takes a post link, or several, one per line. On the iPhone, hit Share in the Reddit app and pick Routines. A share link and the post URL point at the same saved thread, so the second capture is marked as already saved and opens the note you already have. No Reddit account is involved.
Reddit rate-limits by IP address, so a fetch can come back blocked. Routines tries once more on its own, and if that fails too the row says the capture failed instead of storing an empty note. Paste the link again whenever you want to try it once more.
Post + up to 200 comments · desktop paste · iPhone share sheet
New: drop any file
Drag a PDF, a PNG or JPEG screenshot, a text or markdown note, a saved web page, a CSV or a JSON export onto your Workspace. Routines reads it, writes a short summary, tags it, links it to related notes, and saves it as a plain markdown file in the folder where it belongs. Not an inbox you have to sort out later.
PDF · PNG · JPEG · text · markdown · HTML · CSV · JSON
Reading the file
Routines pulls the text out of the file. If it is an image, it looks at the picture itself.
Summarizing
One pass gives the file a title, a short summary, key points and tags.
Saving to your vault
It writes a plain markdown note and links it to the notes you already keep on the subject.
Filed
The note lands in the folder that fits it, and the tray hands you a link straight to it.
Four files · four stages · one tray
Where your files actually go
The note is a plain markdown file in your own folder, on your own disk, and it opens in Obsidian or any editor. Reading and summarizing needs a model, so what Routines reads out of a file, and the picture itself if you dropped an image, is sent to one: through Routines AI, which passes it on and stores nothing, or straight to your provider when you run on your own key. Either way there is no copy of your files on our side, unless you switch on Cloud Sync and Backup yourself, which is off by default and mirrors your vault to your Routines account, or share part of your vault by link.
You do not have to drag anything. The file tree has an Add files button next to New note and New folder, and the same entry sits in the right click menu. It opens a normal file picker, and the files you choose land in the same tray a drag does.
Your memory folder
Choose the folder your notes already live in, on the last step of setup or later under Settings, Memory. The pick itself is instant. Reading and indexing what is in there runs in the background, with progress you can watch, so you are never held up by a spinner.
Settings · Memory · the folder you chose
The same folder · open in the explorer · still plain markdown
Some folders are a bad idea to hand over: your home folder itself, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Library, or the very top of iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive. Routines refuses those in a sentence you can read and offers to create a Routines folder inside instead. Very large folders get the same answer.
It is only the top of a synced drive that is refused. A folder inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox or Google Drive works, and so does a folder inside a git repository. Dot folders, node_modules and generated index files are skipped when Routines counts what is there.
The Settings card, the workspace explorer and the Settings file tree all read the same choice, so no corner of the app is left pointing at an old path.
The Settings card counts your notes with the same bounded walk the guardrail uses. On a very large folder it stops early and tells you it found at least that many, instead of freezing Settings to be exact.
Indexing can tidy the notes while it reads them. Switch on Add frontmatter to notes under Settings, Memory and every note that has none gets a title, a one-line summary, tags and the date it was created. Notes that already have frontmatter keep every line you wrote. It stays off until you turn it on.
Old invoices and receipts are the folder most people already have. If you would rather the new ones arrive on their own every week, there is a routine for that: Invoice & Receipt Collector.
Activity
The Activity panel lists the files you dropped or picked, newest first, and what happened to each one. A badge on the icon counts what is still filing. Click a filed row and the note it became opens. Leave the page, come back, quit the app and open it tomorrow, and the statuses are still there, because they are rows on disk and not something a window was holding.
Reading the file · Summarizing · Filed · Could not file it
A file that cannot be read says so. A scanned PDF with no text in it fails on its own row, in red, with that exact reason, and the rest of the batch carries on.
01
Your entire knowledge base lives as .md files in a folder you choose. Routines chunks everything into a local SQLite database with FTS5 full-text search, and nothing is uploaded unless you switch on Cloud Sync and Backup, which is off by default, or share part of it by link.
02
Create reusable identity, persona, and context snippets, your role, values and expertise, stored as standalone markdown files. Every routine references them by ID so your assistant always knows who you are.
03
Edit memory in VS Code, Obsidian, or any text editor. Routines auto-detects the change via real-time file-system events and re-indexes. No sync button, no polling, no loops.
04
See every note as a node in a force-directed graph, where each markdown link becomes an edge between them. Select any note to highlight its connections and backlinks, then jump straight to it. Renders entirely on your Mac.
05
Because your memory is plain markdown + SQLite, you can swap between Claude, OpenAI, or OpenRouter anytime. Your entire knowledge base stays perfectly intact. The model is just a swappable parameter.
06
Find anything across all your markdown files with sub-millisecond SQLite FTS5 search. Search runs fully offline on your Mac, and your vault stays there unless you switch on Cloud Sync and Backup or share part of it by link.
07
Paste any link, PDF, or note and Routines captures the full content as a markdown file in your vault. It even reads X posts and long-form X Articles in full, where scrapers get blocked and return an empty shell.
08
Drop a PDF, a PNG or JPEG image, text, markdown, HTML, CSV or JSON file onto your Workspace and Routines reads it, summarizes it, tags it and writes it into your vault as a plain markdown note. The folder you chose as your memory is read and indexed in the background instead, without rewriting a line you wrote.
Markdown on your disk, indexed locally, searchable in seconds, and it follows you to any AI model you choose.
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