This seems like a really interesting idea and something I've basically been doing myself manually so far, with a DESIGN.md document with "one concept/decision per line, built in a tree" basically, where all decisions that needs to be remembered gets noted down for future reference.

Not a fan of ThoughtDAG being a complete separate application rather than built into the tools I use every day, like my text editor or other planning tool. But neat that you've seemingly integrated a bunch of LLM providers, including letting us use local models, sufficiently sweet :)

Some security "nitpicks": I'm fairly sure you have a critical security issue in the "execSync(`pdftoppm -png -r ${dpi} ...`)" call you do, which I don't think would have been a issue if the local web server you start listened to 127.0.0.1 or some other local IP, but instead it seems the server binds to 0.0.0.0, meaning all network interfaces. Put together, anyone who runs this application effectively gives anyone else a free shell to your computer :)

Tiny nitpicks about the AppImage specifically, seems it's missing publisher details/signing (not a huge deal, just something you might want to look into) and also it's using "--no-sandbox", don't think you need that, let it be sandboxed instead, and the remote vulnerability above might also become less of an issue :)

I'll hold off a bit to play around with it, because of the issue above, but I'm curious to see if it does provide something more than what I manage with my ASCII Markdown tree of decisions. Maybe there is potential for ThoughtDAG in the future to be better integrated with other tools, and end up mostly being the management/viewer of things, so I can continue using vim and codex as today, but they can read/write via ThoughtDAG perhaps, or some other approach.

Regardless, thanks for sharing it and good luck! :)

The basic idea here looks interesting and is easy to understand but what I'm not understanding is why it's a standalone app. Is this supposed to replace e.g. Claude desktop? Or can it plug in to other systems like Claude Code, Codex, Pi?

I don't think I'd want to use it as a standalone app but I would certainly be interested in it as a plugin.

What about cache? When you change the context the prefill stage will be much slower?

Can this integrate with replit?

This looks like git, doesn't it?

Hi HN, I built ThoughtDAG around one rule: wires are the context.

Each question and answer is a node. When you ask from a node, only its wired upstream nodes are included in the model request. Delete an edge, regenerate, and that branch leaves the model's actual context, not just the visualization.

The interface is intentionally human-controlled. I'm testing whether explicit context control is useful for long-running research, or whether most people would rather delegate memory selection to retrieval.

It is MIT licensed, local-first, supports Ollama and OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and includes PDF clipping with page provenance.

GitHub: https://github.com/chenxiachan/thoughtdag

I'd especially appreciate criticism of the interaction model and onboarding.