A finding you can still defend two years later
Research does not fail because a note was lost. It fails because nobody can show where a claim came from, or prove that what is on file today is what was written then.
Every claim carries its source
Ask a question and the answer comes back with the passages it was built from, each one naming its file and the lines inside it. Not a similarity score and a shrug — the actual text, where it actually is. That is the difference between a summary and a citation.
The history is signed, so it can be checked
Each version of a note is recorded and cryptographically signed as it is written. Anyone can verify later that a note was not edited after the fact — including you, when the question comes from someone who has no reason to take your word for it.
It says when it does not know
An answer is marked grounded, weak, or unsupported by your notes, and the verdict is checked against the words of your own question rather than guessed from a similarity score. A tool that invents a citation is worse for research than no tool at all.
A reviewer questions one sentence in a paper
The sentence is two years old. The person who wrote it has left.
You ask the vault where that claim came from. It returns the interview note it was drawn from, the exact lines, and the date. Beside it is the signed record of that note: written on this day, unchanged since. You open the source file yourself — it is a Markdown file in a folder, so nothing stands between you and it — and read the paragraph in context.
The answer to the reviewer is not "we believe so". It is the passage, its file, and a signature anyone can verify without asking us for anything.
Can I use this with my data?
Retrieval is local. Generation goes where you point it.
Finding the right passages happens on your machine, always. What happens next is your choice: connect a cloud model and the retrieved passages travel to that provider, exactly as they would if you pasted them; point it at a model running locally and nothing leaves the machine at all. That second option is available today, and it is what turns "where is our data processed?" into "on your device".