Basalt — Obsidian plugin

Reads your vault and surfaces what you believe but never wrote down. Inside Obsidian.

This plugin is a thin TypeScript shell over basalt-mcp — the local MCP server that ships with basalt-vault. All verb logic stays in Python; the plugin spawns the binary, calls tools over JSON-RPC stdio, and renders the responses inside Obsidian.

Standalone. Read-only. Local-first. The plugin never writes to your vault. The basalt-mcp subprocess never touches your files; it reads from a SQLite index at ~/.basalt/basalt.db. No network calls in the Open tier.

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Prereqs

You need basalt-vault installed locally with the [mcp] extras:

pip install basalt-vault[mcp]

Then index your vault once via the CLI:

basalt index --vault ~/path/to/your-vault

The plugin reads the resulting SQLite index. Re-run basalt index whenever you want fresh embeddings (the algorithms still work on slightly stale embeddings, but quality compounds with freshness).

Install (manual, until Community Plugins approval lands)

1. Download manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Drop them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/basalt/
3. Restart Obsidian, enable Basalt under Settings → Community Plugins

Commands

Open the command palette (⌘P / Ctrl+P) and type Basalt:

Command	What it does
Compile Brief (all sections)	Surfaces Buried Insight + Connection + Contradiction in one modal
Find buried insight	A note you wrote once and never returned to, that recent notes still cite
Find connections	Pairs of notes in different folders with no wikilink, but the same idea
Find contradictions (v0 heuristic)	Same-topic notes whose load-bearing sentences appear to disagree
Audit past briefs	Re-evaluates pending findings against current vault state — shows which past briefs aged well

Every finding ships with falsification rules — "this is wrong if you ever observe X." Run audit weekly; your track record compounds.

Settings

• basalt-mcp command — path to the executable. Leave empty if it's on your $PATH.
• Vault path override — defaults to BASALT_VAULT env or ~/virtuoso-vault.
• DB path override — defaults to ~/.basalt/basalt.db.
• Findings per section — 1–10 (default 2).

How it differs from other Obsidian "second-brain" plugins

	Basalt	Smart Connections	obsidian-second-brain (eugeniughelbur)
Writes to vault	Never	No	Yes ("vault rewrites itself")
Requires Claude Code	No	No	Yes
Local LLM-free path	Yes (Ollama embeddings only)	Hybrid	No (cloud Claude inference)
Calibration / falsification of past output	Yes	No	No

License

MIT