Silica Bridge

Silica Bridge

Silica's mechanical algorithms, running on your vault with no model, no network and no configuration: a panel that tells you what the vault knows about the note in front of you and what is wrong with it, ranked search, bulk autolinking and a community graph. Plus a side panel that chats with the Silica agent when you have one running, and lets it read and edit your notes through Obsidian's own APIs. Every write, whoever made it, lands in a source-control-style changes list with a per-file diff, so you see what changed before you keep it.

Offline

These need nothing but the vault. They run on an index the plugin builds itself from your notes, kept current by mtime and never written to disk.

• Note panel. Everything the vault has to say about the note you have open, each note listed once under the sharpest thing there is to say about it:
  • Related: Jaccard overlap of each note's top-30 stems, the CORRELATE metric from Silica's ADR-0013. Backlinks answer "who linked here"; this answers "who is about the same thing", which nobody had to link. A row marked unlinked is one where the overlap clears the structural bar and no wikilink exists either way.
  • Near-duplicates: the same idea captured twice, found by Jaccard over whole stem sets rather than the top 30, so two notes on one subject do not read as copies of each other.
  • Orphans you could adopt: notes nobody points at that overlap this one. An orphan is invisible from itself, since you never open it; this is the surface that can show you one.
  • Links without substance: links written out of this note whose target shares almost no vocabulary with it. Index notes are exempt, and so is anything under an excluded folder: a daily note's links are to-dos, about the day and not about the target, which is the same exemption for the same reason.
  • Broken links: link text that resolves to no file.
• Next. The button at the top of the panel walks the whole vault worst-first, one note per press, and says why each one is there. The four signals are fused by rank, not by score, because a Jaccard and a count of broken links share no scale. Nothing is remembered between presses: the signal is the state, so a note you fix simply stops qualifying.
• Search by relevance. BM25 over the same index, fused by rank with a title match. Obsidian's own search is a boolean filter where every hit is equally good; this one ranks. Each hit carries a line of context with the match highlighted, and path:folder/ anywhere in the query scopes it to one folder.
• Autolink this note / Autolink every note. Injects wikilinks for vault titles a note mentions but does not link, skipping frontmatter, code, math, headings and existing links. The pass lands in the changes list, so it is reviewed and revertable file by file.
• Community graph. Louvain over the written links plus the inferred CORRELATE edges, one hue per community, labelled with the stems that community has and its neighbours do not.

Except for autolink, which you ask for, none of this writes to your vault.

Notes written from a template are what breaks this kind of tool: a vault of daily notes shares its scaffolding across every file, so a naive overlap relates all of them to all of them. Every pair here is therefore gated on the overlap that survives dropping the stems more than a quarter of the vault carries — the related list and the graph edges, not only the proposals. That kills the whole class in the algorithm, which is why there is no list of dismissed suggestions to maintain. It works while the templated notes are numerous enough for their scaffolding to cross that quarter; below it, name the folder under Excluded folders.

None of these calls a language model, and the quality ceiling says so: the stemmer is a light suffix stripper for English and Italian rather than Snowball, the language is detected once per vault and then frozen, and the thresholds are starting points rather than measured optima.

Requirements

The chat panel below is a client: for that half you need the Silica agent running on the same machine.

pip install "silica-agent[connect]"
cd /path/to/your/vault
silica connect

silica connect writes silica-bridge.json into the vault's configuration folder — .obsidian, unless the vault renamed it — (mode 0600) with the port and a per-session token. The plugin reads that file, connects, and shows connected in the panel.

Network use

The offline features open no connection at all. The chat panel opens a WebSocket to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and nowhere else. It never contacts a remote host. It talks only to the silica connect process you started yourself, and no data leaves your machine through this plugin.

The agent itself may call a language model, which can be a local one (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp) or a hosted API. That choice is yours and it is configured on the Silica side, not here.

Use

The graph has its own ribbon icon. All of them are also buttons along the top of the bridge panel, and commands under Silica Bridge in the palette. The first one you run builds the index; after that a rebuild only re-reads the notes whose mtime moved, and a rebuild that finds nothing moved reuses the index whole.

For the chat panel:

1. Run silica connect in the vault.
2. Open the panel: the ribbon icon, or Silica Bridge: Open bridge panel in the command palette.
3. Type. Replies render as markdown, so wikilinks are clickable.

What the agent can do to the vault is a fixed allowlist: reads (read, list_files, props_of, outline, search_context, resolved_links, mention_index) and writes (create, overwrite, append, set_prop, move, delete, autolink_note). Anything outside the list is refused by the plugin, not merely unimplemented. The wire contract is in PROTOCOL.md.

Writes driven from the terminal show up in the changes panel too. The list belongs to the session, not to a chat turn, so a long run started in the terminal is reviewable in the same place.

Settings

• Port override: leave empty to use the port from silica-bridge.json. Set it only when you run the agent on a non-default port.
• Excluded folders: comma-separated folders that read the vault without the vault reading them. An excluded note never shows up in anyone else's related notes, never draws an inferred edge on the community graph, never files a row in attention — broken links included, since typing tomorrow's note name today is what a journal is — and never has its own links called substanceless. But its own related pane still works, so a daily note goes on suggesting what the vault holds on what you wrote today, and two excluded notes can never relate to each other. Excluded notes are also sampled last when the vault's language is detected: eight empty days from an English template should not decide the stemmer for an Italian vault. In that pane the unlinked marker answers to the softer of the two thresholds, since nothing outside it can act on the suggestion anyway. Made for journals and other templated notes: notes written from the same template share most of their vocabulary, so they all relate to each other. Stems the whole vault uses are dropped from the comparison automatically, which handles a big templated class on its own; below about a quarter of the vault that share is too small to cull anything, and declaring the folder is the fix. Search still finds the excluded notes, and their written wikilinks stay on the graph. Until you edit the field it follows your Daily notes folder automatically, so the common case needs no setup; clear it to exclude nothing.

Develop

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch -> main.js
npm test         # node --test: the four offline algorithms, plus the bridge state machine
npm run build    # strict tsc typecheck + production bundle

Symlink or copy this folder into <throwaway-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/silica-bridge/ (needs manifest.json and a built main.js), then enable it in Settings -> Community plugins.

License

MIT. The Silica agent itself is AGPL-3.0 and lives in its own repository.