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Khiip Khiip Khiip

Introduction

Khiip (pronounced /kiːp/, like “keep”) is an open-source capture + storage + recall substrate. You point it at online content; it captures that content fully, stores it permanently in your own filesystem, and lets you — or your AI agents — recall it later by meaning, structure, or time.

The substrate, not the destination

Khiip is the layer, not the destination. It does not try to be your note-taking app, your reader, or your second brain UI. It captures and structures sources into plain, typed, portable files — and other tools sit on top:

  • Obsidian / Logseq / any Markdown editor read the vault directly.
  • LLM agents capture and recall over REST or MCP.
  • Your own scripts grep the vault or query the SQLite index.

This is deliberate. The production pattern that has actually won for personal and agent knowledge is plain Markdown files + grep + MCP — portable, inspectable, no proprietary store to migrate out of. Khiip is the best open substrate for that pattern: it does the capture-and-structure work upstream of wherever your knowledge already lives.

Who it’s for

  • PKM power-users who keep a Markdown vault (Obsidian and friends) and want high-fidelity, typed capture of online sources into it.
  • Developers and self-hosters who want a local-first, AGPL substrate they fully control — no hosted dependency, no lock-in.
  • AI builders wiring capture + recall into agent workflows over REST or MCP.

What you get

Typed payloadsEvery source emits a Pydantic-typed payload (TweetPayload, RedditPayload, WebPayload, WikiPayload, YouTubePayload, PDFPayload).
Canonical MarkdownRendered Markdown + YAML frontmatter is the source of truth in your vault.
Raw Source-tierOriginal bytes are preserved separately as insurance against upstream rot.
Bitemporal modelEvery capture records both when Khiip fetched it and when the data was true in the world.
Semantic recallBundled local embeddings, zero LLM cost, works offline.
Knowledge graph (planned)Typed-edge vocabulary + storage schema are defined (SUPPORTS, CONTRADICTS, SUPERSEDES, ELABORATES, REFERENCES + a RELATES escape); the read/write API is not yet surfaced.

Open & self-hosted

Khiip’s daemon is AGPL-3.0 and runs entirely on your machine. There is no hosted capture service — you run the capture, against your own accounts and rate-limit budgets. Your data stays in your filesystem, exportable as Markdown, YAML, or JSON at any time.