CLI tooling for a personal knowledge base that an LLM builds and maintains.
Most work with LLMs and documents is stateless: upload, ask, discard. Sentinel keeps the result. You curate raw sources and ask questions; the agent compiles them into an interconnected wiki of markdown files, and the knowledge compounds instead of being re-derived every time.
You never write the wiki yourself. Sentinel is the CLI underneath — it tracks provenance, finds the gaps, and tells the agent what is most worth doing next.
Built for Claude Code and Obsidian, but the archive is just markdown in a git repo.
cargo install --path . # puts `sentinel` in ~/.cargo/bin
sentinel init ~/Documents/archive --set-default
ln -s /path/to/sentinel/skills ~/Documents/archive/.claude/skillssentinel ingest paper.md -d philosophy -o researched -t "Some Paper"
sentinel next # → compileThen, from an agent in the archive:
/sentinel-grow # work the backlog until it empties
sentinel next is the centre of the tool. It reads the whole archive and names the single most valuable thing to do, in priority order:
fix errors → compile uncompiled sources → write concepts the wiki links but hasn't covered → connect orphans → revisit stalled drafts
$ sentinel next
Next: write
2 concept(s) linked but not yet written; 'virtue' is referenced by 2 article(s)
• virtue — referenced by 2 articles
• ataraxia — referenced by wiki/philosophy/stoicism.md
run: /sentinel-research virtueThe third rung is where the wiki feeds itself. Writing [[virtue]] in an article when no such page exists tells the archive what it is missing; next ranks those gaps by how many articles ask for each. Filling one usually creates new links, which name the next gap.
It converges rather than running away. On a real corpus, filling five top-ranked gaps took the outstanding count from 8 to 3 and orphans to zero — early articles name concepts that don't exist yet, later ones mostly link to pages already written.
Symlinked into the archive's .claude/skills, these are where the work happens. All five read the archive through --json and take the frontmatter contract from sentinel schema rather than restating it, so they keep working as the archive outgrows reading its own index.
/sentinel-grow [n] |
Runs the loop: ask next, do it, re-check. Bounded — 3 iterations by default, stopping early when the backlog empties, a pass makes no progress, or something needs your judgement. Never touches raw/, never deletes an article, never stubs a page to silence a warning. Every iteration lands in meta/log.md. |
/sentinel-compile |
Turn raw documents into wiki articles. One source may touch a dozen pages. Preserves the author's voice for authored material. |
/sentinel-research <topic> |
Research via web search, file the trail under raw/ as origin: researched, then compile it. |
/sentinel-ask <question> |
Answer from the wiki with citations. Offers to file the answer back only when it found a connection no article records — otherwise a knowledge base fills with restatements of what it already knew. |
/sentinel-improve |
Fix errors, work warnings that represent real loss, connect orphans, revisit stale drafts. |
sentinel next # what to do next (--json, --action <rung>)
sentinel status # counts and health
sentinel schema # frontmatter contract, domains, lint rules
sentinel lint # validate frontmatter, links, manifest (--summary, --strict, --rule X)
sentinel index # rebuild indexes, link graph, dashboard
sentinel search "query" # ranked, top 20 (--limit, --matches)
sentinel graph --node X # one article's neighbourhood (--depth N)
sentinel uncompiled # raw docs no article cites yet
sentinel ingest F -d D # register a source (-o origin, -t title, --as name)
sentinel sync # register files dropped into raw/ by hand
sentinel mv old new # move a source, repointing every citation
sentinel rm target # delete a source, refusing if articles cite it
sentinel export --out DIR # the publishable subset (--flat, --clean, --data)
sentinel log op "detail" # append to the activity log; bare `log` reads it
sentinel config # which archive am I pointed at, and why?Resolved in this order, first match wins:
| 1 | --archive <PATH> |
| 2 | SENTINEL_ARCHIVE |
| 3 | archive = "…" in ~/.config/sentinel/config.toml (what --set-default writes) |
| 4 | nearest parent directory containing meta/manifest.json |
Rule 4 means sentinel works from anywhere inside the archive, the way git does. No match is an error listing the fixes, never a guess. sentinel config reports which rule applied.
archive/
raw/ source documents — immutable, never modified by sentinel
wiki/ compiled articles — the agent owns this layer
index/ generated: _master, _by-domain, _recent, _orphans, _uncompiled, _dashboard
meta/ manifest.json, link-graph.json, log.md
templates/ article templates, generated from the frontmatter contract
index/_dashboard.md is the one page to read: the current recommendation, every backlog rung, health by rule, progress, recent activity, and what the agent is instructed to do. Regenerated by sentinel index, and sentinel status tells you when it has fallen behind.
---
title: Article Title
domain: philosophy
origin: authored | researched | hybrid
tags: [topic, other]
sources:
- raw/philosophy/source-file.md
related:
- "[[related-article]]"
created: 2025-01-15
updated: 2025-01-15
status: draft | review | stable
---sources: closes the loop. A raw document counts as compiled once some article cites it, which makes sentinel uncompiled a work queue that empties as the wiki grows. origin records whether the content is the user's own writing (authored), gathered by research (researched), or both (hybrid) — it cannot be recovered from the file later, so ingest -o is worth getting right.
sentinel export --out ./content --flat --cleanWrites only articles whose status qualifies (stable by default), rewrites links to unpublished articles as plain text so the output has no dead ends, and never copies raw/ or meta/. It renders no HTML — feed it to Quartz or any generator that understands wikilinks.
--data <file> also emits a JSON bundle — published nodes and edges, plus the growth history from meta/progress.jsonl — for a front end to render.
docs/publishing.md has the verified Quartz setup and self-hosting options.
Every read command takes --json. Each payload carries schema_version, the command, and the archive it describes. Errors are JSON too, on stderr, so there is one thing to parse.
| Exit | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0 | success |
| 1 | the command failed |
| 2 | it ran and found problems |
lint exits 2 on errors — malformed frontmatter, a missing required field, an invalid origin/status/date, colliding slugs, a sources: entry matching nothing, a manifest entry with no file. Warnings alone exit 0: an archive with uncompiled sources and forward-declared [[wikilinks]] is healthy mid-workflow, not broken. --strict fails on warnings too.
sentinel lint --json | jq -r '.findings[] | select(.severity=="error") | "\(.rule)\t\(.path)"'Three layers, following the LLM Wiki pattern: raw sources you curate and sentinel never modifies; the wiki the agent owns entirely; and the schema, published by sentinel schema and generated from the code so it cannot drift from what the tool enforces.
CLAUDE.md states the invariants; docs/design-notes.md explains what went wrong to produce each one.
MIT