Guides

How-To

Practical GNO recipes for keeping collections fresh, building personal knowledge bases, connecting AI tools, and recovering stale indexes.

GNO is not only for codebases. It works well for a personal knowledge base, research archive, meeting-note library, PDF folder, or Karpathy-style “memory bank” that your AI tools can search before they answer. These recipes start from useful outcomes, not implementation details.

Keep a collection fresh automatically

Use gno daemon when you want local file changes to become searchable without keeping the Web UI open.

gno init ~/Documents/Knowledge --name knowledge
gno index --models-pull
gno daemon --detach
gno daemon --status
gno daemon --stop

The daemon watches configured collections, syncs changed files, and embeds new chunks. Use --no-sync-on-start if you only want future changes handled. For git-backed folders, run gno update --git-pull or gno index --git-pull when you want remote commits pulled in.

Build a personal AI memory bank

1. Put notes, PDFs, docs, exports, and research into one folder or a few topic folders.
2. Add them as GNO collections with clear names.
3. Run gno index, then keep them fresh with gno daemon --detach.
4. Install MCP or skills so your AI assistant can retrieve from that memory before answering.

gno collection add ~/Documents/Research --name research
gno collection add ~/Documents/Notes --name notes
gno collection add ~/Downloads/Papers --name papers
gno index
gno mcp install --target claude-desktop
gno skill install --target all --scope user --force

Connect your AI tools

Pick the integration by how you want the assistant to behave.

• MCP — automatic tool calls from Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Zed, Windsurf, OpenCode, Amp, LM Studio, LibreChat, and compatible clients.
• Agent skills — explicit /gno lookups with low context overhead.
• REST API — scripts, launchers, dashboards, and custom local apps.

gno mcp install --target cursor --scope project
gno skill install --target codex --scope user

Use GNO without living in a terminal

Start the local workspace, then add folders and manage indexing from the browser.

gno serve
open http://localhost:3000

Use Search for retrieval, Ask for cited answers, Browse for document navigation, Graph for relationships, and Collections for folder management.

Fix stale or missing results

1. Confirm the files are indexed: gno ls --collection notes.
2. Rescan changed files: gno update.
3. Refresh embeddings: gno embed notes.
4. Run the full path: gno index.
5. Diagnose system issues: gno doctor.

If you changed the embedding model, clear stale collection embeddings before rebuilding them:

gno collection clear-embeddings notes
gno embed notes

Research with filters and graph context

Combine filters when your archive grows beyond simple search.

gno query "learning loops" --collection research --tags-any ai,pkm
gno ask "what are my strongest notes on retrieval?" --since "last month" --answer
gno graph --neighbors gno://notes/llm-memory.md --include-similar
gno graph --from gno://notes/a.md --to gno://notes/b.md

Share a polished snapshot

Local GNO stays private. When you intentionally want to publish a note or collection, export an artifact and upload it through gno.sh Studio.

gno publish export atlas --out ~/Downloads/atlas.json

Then open /studio, import the artifact, and pick public, secret-link, invite-only, or encrypted sharing.