Show HN: Engrym – a Markdown knowledge base your coding agent reads and writes

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2 points·laleshii··4 comments

How does this differ from Obsidian?

Both are Markdown-as-source-of-truth with a graph.

The difference: Obsidian is a GUI app for your personal notes; engrym is a headless CLI your coding agent drives, and the KB lives in the repo versioned with the code (or locally if you want to not mess with the repo files).

Two things it does that Obsidian doesn't out of the box: hybrid search (BM25 + local vector embeddings, offline, no API key), and a typed, lint-checked schema (id, altitude, typed relations) so an agent can go from overview to impl detail as a real query, not a keyword guess.

The CLI and schema is the only benefit but I would say they fit agentic coding flows better.

FYI Obsidian does have a CLI with search abilities:

https://obsidian.md/cli

I store my Obsidian in git as well for versioning. There are a few different plugins for that.

I think that Obsidian may not have the schema that you are talking about and I think that it may be missing the hybrid search. It has local search only I believe.

I think as a general rule Obsidian is viewed as a personal KB. The CLI that I built I see it more as a repository specific tool part of building things with AI agents so that important information is encoded and fetched when needed without additional prompting.

But I do understand that overlap is there and the justification for using a separate tool might be a stretch.

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