Basement

A hackable base for your markdown vault. It ingests your markdown files into a vector index, then uses retrieval to answer questions from your own notes.

What Basement Does

Basement lets you:

1. Ingest notes from vault/ into a vector index.
2. Chat against that indexed content to retrieve relevant context and answer questions.

This is useful for building a personal “second brain” that you can query in natural language.

Requirements

• Node.js (recommended: current LTS)
• pnpm
• OpenAI API key

Install

pnpm install

Configuration

Rename .env.example to .env and paste in your OpenAI API key:

OPENAI_API_KEY="your_api_key_here"

Usage

1) Ingest Notes

pnpm ingest

This reads markdown files from vault/ and writes/updates the index in vault-index/.

2) Chat With Your Vault

pnpm chat

Then ask questions in natural language.

Typical Workflow

• Add or edit notes in vault/
• Re-run pnpm ingest
• Query with pnpm chat

Notes

• vault-index/ is generated data; you can usually rebuild it by running pnpm ingest again.
• Keep secrets like API keys out of source control.