Why I am building orgthread

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0100

My notes live in one folder of plain text files, some in Markdown and some in Org. Tasks, reading notes, a journal, fitness notes, the menus for the week, and a personal knowledge base in Markdown. More and more, AI agents edit them for me.

This post is about why I am building orgthread, a safety layer between those agents and my files. Its tagline: AI agents edit your notes. You set the rules.

The editor road

I started, like most people, by looking for the right editor. I tried several and paid for some.

Each one solved a part. One app knew Org, but not Markdown. The next one knew Markdown, but not Org. Most of them synced whole files, so now and then I edited an old copy and lost a newer change. On the phone, a growing folder got slower and slower to edit. On the Mac, I kept switching between an editor to write and a chat to ask questions. And my own notes were not always in the same shape, so something had to check them.

Git is great for code, but not for a phone, a tablet and a laptop that all change the same notes during the day.

So I stopped looking, and I asked the AI to make the changes for me. That worked well. Then the AI needed rules.

A kitchen with many cooks

Think of a shared kitchen. Many cooks are fine, as long as each one knows which shelf is theirs, and nobody cooks from an old copy of the recipe.

My folder became that kitchen. At night, several agents work on it at the same time. During the day, I send my own requests as well. Without rules, edits land in the wrong order, or two writers change the same file and one change is lost.

There is a second problem: ownership. Some files are mine, and some are for the AI. I do not want an agent to rewrite my journal, and I do not want to overwrite a file that an agent keeps up to date. Each side may still touch the other’s files, but only on request, and the owner hears about it.

And there is sync. My notes must reach my phone and my tablet, so they live in a synced folder. But on the Mac, the files are right there, and the long way through the sync service is slow.

What orgthread does

With orgthread in between, AI agents never touch my Markdown or Org files directly. It has four parts:

Owner rules: I decide who may touch what.
Safe writes: every change takes a lock, checks that the file is still fresh, makes a backup, writes a log entry, and can be undone.
The outside-text guard: text from mail and the web is data, not orders.
Nightly checks: every night, orgthread checks the folder and tells me what it found.

It runs on my own computer, or on a server I run myself. No third-party service holds or reads the files.

Some parts are still open. The biggest one is how to make sure every agent really goes through orgthread, and not around it. I will write about it in the Build log once I have an answer.

Not only for me

Many people now hand their notes to AI. Often the person and one or more agents edit the same files at the same time.

Small groups share notes too. Picture a family: the menu for the week makes the shopping list, someone ticks off what they bought, and nobody buys the same thing twice. Other sources can write into the files as well, such as workout data from a watch. How far orgthread will go here is still open.

All of them meet in plain files. That is on purpose. Plain files belong to you, and any tool can read them. Many AI tools want your data in their own place. I want mine free of lock-in.

Why in the open

I have admired open source for a long time. It started with Ubuntu and its idea of sharing, and I was one of the founders of the Romanian Ubuntu community. Then I published a few Meteor plugins. Now comes a project of my own.

There are three reasons:

My own itch: I am building orgthread for my own notes, so I know my interest will last.
Learning both ways: we are all still learning how to work with AI. I write down what I find, and your feedback and your use of the tools teach me in return.
Community: I enjoy the people who care about the same things, and the ideas they bring.

The code will be under MIT or Apache-2.0, as you choose. The spec will be under CC BY 4.0.

Where it stands

I am building it myself, with AI agents as the crew. Parts of it already work in my own folder of notes, as written rules and lock steps that my agents follow. Now I turn them into a real tool. That folder is user number one.

Nothing is released yet. The first release, v0.1 Safe writes, comes when it is ready. Until then, I build in the open, one step at a time, and write about each step here.

If you want to follow along, subscribe to the Build log feed and follow orgthread on GitHub. Once the code is public, a star there helps too.

Posts tagged orgthread · Silviu Bojica