Lectic

Turn material you trust into reusable expertise for your AI assistant.

Lectic saves your notes, transcripts, and links, then helps an assistant turn them into source-backed methods it can apply again later. It keeps the original evidence, shows where a rule came from, and lets you inspect, reuse, update, or share the result.

That is different from asking an AI to summarize something once. A summary helps with one conversation. Lectic keeps the useful parts so a future conversation can use them on new work.

Works with Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, and Cursor.

What Lectic does

When you paste text or a video link into a chat with an AI, the AI forgets that information as soon as you close the conversation.

Lectic saves your links, notes, and video transcripts into folders on your computer. When you ask your AI a question, it searches those saved files, writes an answer based on what you saved, and shows you the exact sentence and timestamp from the original source.

How to set it up

1. Ask your assistant to set it up

If you use Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, paste this sentence into your chat:

Set up Lectic for me: https://github.com/tyreamer/lectic

Your assistant will download Lectic and connect to it automatically. When it finishes, restart your assistant once so it can use its new tools.

2. See the value offline

Say this to your assistant:

Try Lectic with its offline debugging starter.

Lectic creates a test collection from a small debugging lesson, reviews one plan, and then applies the same saved knowledge to a second plan. The output shows the input, the reusable checklist, and how many saved knowledge units were reused. This test runs on your computer without downloading anything or calling an external API.

3. Install it yourself

If you prefer to install it yourself, run these commands in your terminal:

pip install --upgrade lectic
lectic setup --yes
lectic start

lectic start asks what Lectic should learn from and what you want to use it for. Press Enter at the first question to run the offline debugging example instead. You can run lectic status at any time to see where your files are saved and which assistants are connected.

What you can give it

• A YouTube link, when English captions are available
• Notes and text files (.txt, .md)
• Timed transcripts (.vtt, .srt)
• Browser shortcuts (.url, .webloc)
• Several sources combined around one task

Lectic does not require you to turn everything into a special format before saving it. Capture first, then process material when you are ready to use it.

What you get back

Depending on your goal, Lectic can produce a source-backed review, decision, plan, checklist, improvement, or other reusable method. Each result can retain:

• The source passages that support it
• The situations where the guidance applies
• Disagreements and limitations that remain unresolved
• The method an assistant can apply to new work
• The build and source history needed to inspect or update it

See the example gallery for five complete journeys: learning from a tutorial, developer architecture review, student study, professional evidence comparison, and a personal debugging playbook.

Share and maintain what you build

Create a static page that opens locally and can be hosted anywhere:

lectic share-artifact "Engineering Standards"

When the source folder changes, save a new immutable revision and inspect the difference:

lectic refresh "Engineering Standards" --from ./engineering-standards
lectic diff "Engineering Standards"

Earlier source revisions and builds remain available. Lectic reports file-level changes immediately, then your connected assistant prepares updated knowledge without fabricating semantic change counts.

How to use it every day

1. Save files and links

You can tell your assistant:

Save this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24JAM7BACtA

Your assistant saves the link to your Inbox folder. If you give the name of a collection, it puts the link into that collection.

You can also drag web links from Chrome, Edge, or Safari directly into the Documents/Lectic Inbox folder on your computer. You can also drop text files (.txt, .md) and transcript files (.vtt, .srt) into that folder. Lectic does not need a background app running to notice these files. The next time you open your assistant, it will tell you what files are waiting in your folder and ask where you want to put them.

2. Ask questions about what you saved

You can ask your assistant to read your saved files and answer questions:

What does my debugging video say about fixing parser bugs?

Your assistant reads your saved transcript, summarizes the advice, and quotes the exact sentence and timestamp:

According to Ada in debugging-lesson.vtt at 00:09, "Change one suspected cause at a time, rerun the same input, and compare the result."

You can also ask your assistant to extract words and phrasing from saved material:

Extract the vocabulary and recurring phrases in this interview. Show examples and keep each speaker's wording separate.

The assistant preserves these observations with source passages and situation limits so you can reuse them in later writing tasks.

3. Share collections with coworkers

You can export a collection into a single .lectic file to share with other people:

# 1. Set your name and email address so recipients know who created the file
lectic identity set "Alex Rivera" --contact alex@example.com

# 2. Export your collection into a single file
lectic pack "Engineering Standards" --team

# 3. Send that file to a coworker. They install it by running:
lectic install engineering-standards.lectic --as standards --pin

When your coworker asks their assistant about engineering standards, their assistant will search and quote the same material. When you update the file, your coworker can run lectic update standards to get the latest version.

Supported files

Other web pages are saved as links for your reference. Lectic does not download full article text from general websites.

Checking your files

You can check whether every quote in a collection still matches the original file text by running:

lectic verify "Engineering Standards"

If all quotes match their sources, Lectic prints verified and exits with code 0. If a quote was edited, deleted, or its source file was moved, Lectic prints which quote failed and exits with code 1. You can run this command in automated test scripts to make sure your AI never quotes broken sources.

Where your files are kept

All of your saved files, notes, and collections are stored in a folder called .lectic in your user directory (for example, C:\Users\YourName\.lectic on Windows or /Users/yourname/.lectic on macOS). Lectic does not send your files to a cloud server. Your data stays on your computer.

If you want to use Lectic with ChatGPT on the web or on your phone, you can run lectic share to create a temporary, password-protected web address. Anyone who has that address can read your saved files, so keep that address private.

Contributing and license

Lectic is open-source software licensed under the MIT license.

For technical details, read the developer documentation, the architecture notes, and the MCP tool reference.