ask 0.5.0: Notes-Only Mode

ask 0.5.0 is out. The headline: the assistant can now answer strictly from your personal notes, refusing to fill gaps with general knowledge.

The problem with always-on notes

Since 0.3.x, ask consults your notes automatically. But when your notes do not contain the answer, the model silently reaches for general knowledge. Sometimes that is what you want. Sometimes you specifically want to know what did I write down about this? For those moments, a confident general-knowledge answer is worse than no answer, because it hides the fact that your notes came up empty.

Notes-only mode

ask -n "what's six sigma DMIAC?"

The assistant must search notes first, read promising matches, and cite them inline as [note: Title](file://path). If nothing relevant exists, it says so and stops. -n is mutually exclusive with -N / --no-notes, which skips notes entirely for a query. Three modes, one character each:

Flag	Behavior
(none)	Notes consulted when relevant, general knowledge allowed
-n	Notes only, no general knowledge
-N	Notes ignored for this query

Reads are free, writes ask

Tool confirmation was all-or-nothing: every search_notes and read_note prompted for a y/N even though they only read local files. The new policy follows the repo principle “AI writes, humans delete, humans gate writes”:

• search_notes and read_note run without prompting
• save_note still asks before touching a file

A notes-heavy query used to interrupt three or four times. Now it reads freely and only pauses when it wants to persist something.

Fully local

With Ollama or LM Studio everything runs on your machine: chat, embeddings, and the sqlite index at ~/.ask-notes/.index.db. The markdown files remain the source of truth. After one-time model downloads, no network access is needed at all.

Install

brew tap nimahejazi/tap
brew install nh-ask-cli

or pip install nh-ask-cli. Full release notes: v0.5.0 on GitHub