Foundation
A local AI knowledge base, from the folder you already have
Open the folder where your notes and documents already live, and it stops being a pile of files: you can ask it anything, hand it work, and get the results back into it. There is nothing to migrate — if MindMax does not earn its place, delete the app and your files are exactly where they were.
A folder you can put to work, not a pile of files
A folder of notes on its own is an archive: it holds what you put in and waits for you to search it. With the assistant living in it, it becomes somewhere you can ask questions and hand over work.
- Ask across everything in it — notes, PDFs, EPUB and Kindle books, Word and PowerPoint files — and get answers that quote the page they came from.
- Hand it a job — annotate a whole book, translate a document, draft a report — and the result lands back in the folder as a file.
- What lands there is material for the next question. Annotate a book this week, and next week a question across your reading can quote both the book and your notes on it.
- Nothing to set up first. Open the folder and the assistant is already there — no upload, no import, no library to build.
You decide what counts as your knowledge
Everything you can see in the file tree is in reach by default. That is only comfortable if you can draw the line, and see where the assistant actually looked.
- Right-click a file or folder to keep the AI out of it. It is marked in the file tree, so a document that never comes up has a visible reason.
- Chats and other working material are left out on their own, so the assistant never finds its own earlier answers and cites them back to you as your sources.
- @ a document to have it read in full, or narrow a conversation to only the documents you added.
- Every answer lists what it drew on. A file counts only if the assistant opened it or quoted it; files it merely came across are given as a number, not passed off as sources.
What an ordinary folder actually buys you
MindMax opens the folder you already have. Nothing is imported, nothing is converted, nothing is locked in — your notes stay plain Markdown on your own disk.
No import step
Point at a folder and start. An existing Obsidian vault opens in place, with no conversion and no second copy to keep in sync.
Your links keep working
[[Wiki links]] resolve the way they did before, and backlinks are computed from the files rather than from a database.
Nothing proprietary is written
Notes, annotations and outputs are Markdown. Everything MindMax produces stays readable if you stop paying.
Documents live next to notes
PDFs, EPUBs and Office files sit in the same folder as the notes about them — searchable together, not in separate silos.
Sync is whatever you already use
Because it is an ordinary folder, iCloud, Dropbox or Syncthing carry it between your machines. There is no account-bound cloud store.
Anything it changed can be undone
MindMax keeps its own history of every note it writes to — apart from any Git or sync you already use, with nothing to set up. Compare an earlier version and restore it.
Version history →Even its memory is a file
What the assistant has concluded about you and your work is kept as plain text you can open and edit. A wrong conclusion is a line you delete.
Where it gets hard
- Obsidian plugins stay in Obsidian
This version does not load Obsidian plugins. Nothing is removed from the vault and they keep working in Obsidian on the same folder, but whatever a plugin does for you is not available inside MindMax.
- One person, one folder
There is no shared workspace, no multiplayer editing and no team permissions. If you need those, this is the wrong tool and no setting changes that.
- Sync conflicts are your sync tool’s problem
Using an ordinary folder means you inherit whatever your sync service does when two machines edit the same file. That is the cost of not having a proprietary store.
- The first open of a big folder takes a while
Notes are ready at once. PDFs, books and Office files are read in the background the first time, and until they are, answers say how many are not ready yet instead of claiming your files have nothing on it. On very large folders it narrows down before searching and tells you when a search did not cover everything.
- Scanned PDFs need recognising first
A scanned PDF has no text to search until you run recognition on it. That is started by you, one document at a time, so nothing is spent without your say — until then the book is in the folder but out of reach for questions.
- Local files, not necessarily a local model
To answer, the passages the assistant reads are sent to the model you use: through MindMax, or straight to the provider of your own API key. If nothing should leave this machine, point it at a model running locally, such as Ollama or LM Studio.
- Found by reading, not by similarity
There is no vector database behind the search. It finds material the way you would — by structure, by the words on the page, and by trying other wordings — so each answer traces to a passage you can open. The trade-off: a question phrased very differently from your files, or asked in another language, can miss.
Common questions
What changes when the assistant lives in my folder?
The folder stops being a pile of files you search through and becomes something you can ask and put to work. You can ask across everything in it and get answers that quote the page, hand it a job such as annotating a book or drafting a report, and the result lands back in the folder as a file that the next question can draw on.
Do I have to import my notes, and what happens if I stop using MindMax?
Nothing is imported or converted. MindMax opens a folder you already have and writes ordinary Markdown files into it, so if you uninstall the app your files stay exactly where they were.
Can I keep some files away from the AI?
Yes. Right-click a file or folder and choose not to let the AI read it; it is marked in the file tree so you can see why it never comes up. Chat history and other working material are left out automatically, so the assistant never cites its own earlier answers as if they were your sources.
Can I undo something the AI changed?
Yes. MindMax keeps its own history of what it touched, separate from any version control you use, so you can look back and roll a change back.
See also
What you can ask of it and hand over to it once it lives in the folder — reading, drafting, revising.
What you actually write in once the folder is open.
Questions that span the whole folder, notes and PDFs alike.
Opening an existing vault in place, and what stays in Obsidian.
Why there is no vector database to build, and what that costs.
Choose which model reads your folder, including one that runs on this machine.
The step-by-step guide: hiding files from AI, excluding folders, seeing what is searchable yet.