Hindsight for Obsidian

Give your Obsidian vault an AI agent that actually knows your notes, powered by Hindsight.

The plugin syncs your vault into a Hindsight memory bank and adds a chat panel whose answers are grounded on your notes — and cite them.

Source of truth stays in Obsidian

A hard rule of this plugin: Hindsight is never a second source of truth.

• Sync is one-way: Obsidian → Hindsight. Your vault is canonical.
• Every chat answer cites the note it came from, so you fix things at the source.
• Chat conversations are not stored by default (toggle in settings).
• Edit a note and Hindsight reconverges on the next sync.

What it does

• Incremental vault sync — each note becomes a Hindsight document. Edits upsert, deletes remove. A content hash skips unchanged notes.
• Implicit scoping — every note is auto-tagged on ingest with its vault, folder (and sub-folders), and created/updated dates. You never think about scope until you recall — then filter by any combination (vault + folder + date) via Hindsight's tag_groups. Multiple vaults share one bank and stay separable by their vault: tag.
• Same data from UI and API — the Obsidian chat panel and your external automations (n8n, Hermes, etc.) hit the same bank with the same tags, so they see exactly the same scoped view.
• Grounded chat — a side panel that answers questions over your notes via Hindsight reflect. Each answer lists the notes retrieved (click to open) and a reasoning disclosure showing what each step queried. Scope a question with the vault / folder dropdowns above the ask bar, start a fresh thread with New chat, and flip on Debug logging to see the exact reflect request + retrieved notes in the console.
• Manual or automatic — sync on every edit, or run Sync vault now on demand.
• Always-visible sync status — a live indicator in the status bar (and the chat header) shows how many notes are synced, when the last sync ran, and any pending edits — e.g. Hindsight ✓ 412 notes · 2m ago. A refresh button beside it (which spins while syncing) triggers a sync on click, so nothing happens invisibly.

Scoping

| Dimension | Tag(s) | Example recall filter | | -------------------- | ------------------------------------ | ------------------------ | | Vault | vault:<name> | only the Work vault | | Folder (+ ancestors) | folder:Work, folder:Work/Clients | everything under Work/ | | Date | created:2026-03, updated:2026-06 | notes updated this month |

Your own frontmatter tags/aliases are carried through too.

Installation

✨ Recommended: Hindsight Cloud — sign up free, get an API key, and skip self-hosting.

While in beta, install via BRAT: add the repo vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian — the dedicated plugin repo BRAT installs from (see Distribution) — then enable it under Settings → Community plugins.

Self-hosting alternative:

pip install hindsight-all
export HINDSIGHT_API_LLM_API_KEY=your-openai-key
hindsight-api

Configuration

Open Settings → Hindsight:

| Setting | Default | Description | | ------------------------- | ------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | API URL | https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io | Hindsight server (use http://localhost:8888 for self-hosted) | | API key | — | Hindsight Cloud API key | | Bank name | obsidian | Shared bank for all your vaults (separated by vault: tags) | | Include / exclude folders | — | Limit which notes sync | | Sync on edit | on | Re-ingest notes automatically as you edit | | Default chat depth | low | Reflect budget for chat answers | | Remember conversations | off | When on, chat turns are stored in Hindsight (creates memory outside your vault) | | Prefix document IDs | on | Vault-prefixes ids so shared-bank vaults don't collide; turn off only for a single-vault setup |

Commands

• Sync vault now — full reconcile (ingest changed notes, prune deleted ones).
• Ingest current note — force-sync the active note.
• Open chat — open the grounded chat panel.

How it works

note created / edited ──▶ retain(documentId = note path)     (upsert; replaces prior version)
note renamed         ──▶ deleteDocument(old) + retain(new)
note deleted         ──▶ deleteDocument(path)
"Sync vault now"     ──▶ reconcile: ingest drifted notes, prune orphans

chat turn            ──▶ reflect(question) over the whole bank
                         └─ answer + citations (→ source notes) + reasoning

A local index (note path → content hash + mtime) means only changed notes are re-ingested.

Development

npm install
npm run lint     # tsc --noEmit
npm test         # vitest
npm run build    # esbuild → main.js

To try it in a real vault, copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hindsight/ and enable the plugin.

Distribution & maintainers

Edit only this monorepo. The dedicated repo is generated automatically on release — never commit to it directly.

| Repo | Role | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | hindsight-integrations/obsidian/ (this monorepo) | Source of truth. All code, tests, and the npm package (@vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian) live here. | | vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian | Generated distribution repo for BRAT + the Obsidian community store. The release workflow mirrors this folder here (via git subtree) and cuts the GitHub Release. |

Why two repos? Obsidian's BRAT and community store install from a repo's latest GitHub Release. We can't use this monorepo's releases — they pollute the core product's release list and steal the "Latest" badge, and BRAT reads a repo's latest release (the core app), not a tag. So distribution releases go to a dedicated repo.

Releasing an update — just cut the monorepo release as usual:

./scripts/release-integration.sh obsidian <version>

The Release Integration workflow then automatically (see .github/workflows/release-integration.yml → "Mirror Obsidian plugin"):

1. publishes the npm package @vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian,
2. mirrors this folder to the root of vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian with git subtree push --prefix=hindsight-integrations/obsidian, and
3. cuts a GitHub Release there tagged with the bare version (e.g. 0.1.0, matching manifest.json) so BRAT / the community store pick it up.

No manual second-repo step. The mirror needs a repo/org secret OBSIDIAN_DIST_TOKEN — a token with contents: write on vectorize-io/hindsight-obsidian.