Harbor Mind CLI

Local-first knowledge infrastructure for Obsidian vaults

Harbor Mind helps teams retrieve decisions and research from their own notes, capture new material with provenance, and maintain a more useful internal wiki without moving the vault out of their control.

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Problem

Important context is often spread across project notes, meeting write-ups, research, and partially maintained wiki pages. Traditional search struggles with wording differences, while general-purpose AI tools cannot reliably show what they are grounding an answer in.

Solution

Harbor Mind combines hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval with wikilink graph expansion, then adds practical workflows for capture, compilation, linting, daily status, project briefs, and read-only MCP access.

Why it matters

A durable knowledge system should make existing work easier to find, inspect, and improve. Harbor Mind keeps the vault as the source of truth while making that context usable at the terminal and by compatible agents.

Who it is for

Developers who keep project knowledge in Obsidian
Technical founders and small product teams
Researchers managing a growing personal knowledge base
Teams building grounded AI workflows around private notes

Use cases

Recover a project’s decisions, next actions, and evidence before starting work
Ask grounded questions and inspect the note paths behind the answer
Capture meeting notes, files, and web research with provenance metadata
Compile raw material into a structured wiki and find missing or stale concepts
Give MCP-compatible agents read-only access to vault search and project briefs

Quickstart

Turn an Obsidian vault into usable project context

Harbor Mind is designed to run beside your vault. It uses a local PGVector database and an OpenAI-compatible model endpoint by default, with optional cloud chat fallback.

Install

Build and connect your local workspace

Set the vault and start PGVector

export HARBOR_MIND_VAULT_PATH=/absolute/path/to/your/obsidian-vault
docker compose up -d

Build Harbor Mind

./gradlew build
alias hm='java -jar /absolute/path/to/harbor-mind-cli/build/libs/harbor-mind-cli.jar'

Check the local setup

hm doctor
hm ingest

Start with a project brief

hm brief --project harbor-mind
hm ask --show-sources "What did I decide about retrieval?"

Capture and curate new knowledge

hm capture notes.md --project harbor-mind --topics "retrieval,rag"
hm lint --fix

Explore all 8 technical features

Hybrid vector and keyword retrieval with reciprocal-rank fusion
Wikilink graph expansion to surface related vault context
Grounded RAG answers with source-path visibility
Deterministic project briefs with citations, diagnostics, and bounded output
Capture workflow for files, stdin, and web sources with provenance metadata
Raw-to-curated wiki compilation, linting, and missing-concept detection
Read-only stdio MCP server for search, context, status, and project briefs
Local-first defaults with optional OpenAI or Anthropic chat fallback

Build with the lab

Build with Harbor Mind CLI

Have a focused use case for Harbor Mind CLI? Green Harbor Labs can help shape the integration or prototype.

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