Welcome

You keep notes the way you always have. Existential reads them, holds them in relation, and stays present alongside your day. It is a personal knowledge system that runs on your own machine, built around the Oracle, a single resident intelligence made of many small agents. Those agents read what you write, score it, connect it, and arrive each morning with something worth your attention.

What it does that other tools do not

Most tools work on the pieces of what you write, treating your thinking as a pile of items to keep and retrieve.

Existential works on the whole. It reveals the shape of your thinking, the form your ideas already have that you cannot see from inside them. You see how your beliefs connect, which ones carry the most weight, where the same idea keeps returning under different names.

The Oracle does this by reflecting your thinking's structure back to you. It never tells you what to think. It shows you the form your thinking has already taken, and leaves the conclusions to you.

How a note moves through it

You capture a thought in Capture, where you write or speak it. From there the Oracle takes over. It brings each note in on its own through a twelve-stage pipeline: tidying the text, reading it for structure and meaning, breaking it into passages, scoring each for conviction (a measure of significance, never truth), and weaving the result into the graph that holds everything you have written.

You meet the Oracle's work in two places. The morning brief draws a connection you did not consciously go looking for. The Library holds every note alongside what the Oracle inferred about it. When you want to think something through, the Console turns the same resident mind toward conversation, and Activity narrates the constellation's work in an understated line.

It stays quiet, and it stays local

Existential is built for contemplative work, so it does not pull on your attention. The brief and the close-out are there when you arrive and do nothing if you never open them. Nothing pings you.

It also stays on your machine. Your notes, your graph, and the Oracle all live on your own disk by default. Nothing crosses any boundary without your consent. That commitment is structural.

Where to go next

If you want to get running, start with Install and Run. If you want to understand the machinery first, read How It Works, which follows a note from Capture all the way into the graph.