What is Coeus?
Coeus is a desktop app for taking notes and talking to them.
You write in it. You drop files into it. You paste URLs into it. Then you ask it questions and it answers from what you've put there. Not from the internet, not from some generic AI. From your own words.
Everything stays on your machine. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you pick. No proprietary format, no cloud sync required.
What you can do with it
Write and capture. Coeus has a markdown editor. You can type a note, record your voice and have it transcribed, paste a URL and have the page saved as a note, or drop in a PDF. It all ends up as searchable text.
Ask questions. You connect an AI provider (Claude, OpenAI, a local model, your pick) and then ask things like "what did I write about that book?" or "show me all my meeting notes from this week." It reads your notes and answers.
Search without keywords. There's regular text search, but also semantic search, which means you can describe what you're looking for instead of remembering the exact words you used.
Capture from your phone. There's a Telegram bot integration. You send a message to it, and it shows up as a note.
Use any editor. Coeus watches your notes folder. If you edit a file in VS Code, Vim, or Obsidian, Coeus picks up the change automatically.
Who it's for
I built it for myself. I take a lot of notes and I kept losing things because I was spending more time organizing than writing. So I stopped organizing. Coeus is what I built to make that work.
If you've tried Notion, Obsidian, Roam, or Logseq and you find yourself spending more time setting up the system than using it, this might be what you're looking for.
It's also good if you care about owning your data. Your notes are just files. You can open them in any text editor. You can back them up however you want. Coeus doesn't lock you in.
Where to start
- Install Coeus on your Mac or Linux machine
- Run through setup to pick a folder and connect an AI provider
- Read about writing notes or asking questions
It's in beta. I use it every day. New features come out when they're ready.