Verivann

A local-first intake router. Everything you save, judged — and a record of which of your sources have lied to you.

Capturing, archiving and summarizing are solved. Judging is not. Verivann reads what you throw at it — articles, videos, screenshots, voice memos, PDFs, feeds — and does the part no other tool does: it decides what the material deserves to become, routes it, connects it to what you already have, notices when it contradicts you, and keeps a permanent record of who told you.

It is not a bookmark manager, not a read-it-later app, not a YouTube summarizer, and not a cloud service. It runs on your machine. Nothing leaves it unless you say so.

Link in.  →  Meaning out.

The name is veri- (verify, veritas) + -vann (vannus, the fan that winnows grain from chaff): the two things it does — judge what is true, and sift signal from noise.

Install

Verivann is a local program. It needs Python 3.10+.

pipx install verivann      # recommended — an isolated, always-available install
#   or:  pip install verivann

Then, once:

verivann setup             # pick a free model, write your config, launch the inbox

setup walks you through connecting a model (there are free options — Cloudflare, Groq, Gemini, or a fully-local Ollama). Everything works without one too, on an offline keyword heuristic — a model just makes it much better.

The daily command is vv (verivann also works):

vv                         # the cockpit: what is due, what is rotting, what you owe a verdict
vv serve                   # the inbox in your browser — paste, search, ask
vv ingest-url "https://…"  # digest something from the terminal
vv doctor                  # what is wired up, what is optional

The first sixty seconds

1. vv serve opens a small dark page at localhost:8130.
2. Paste a link or any text → you get a note: a summary, the ideas worth keeping, the claims to check, where it should be routed — and a Keep / Drop button.
3. Keeping and dropping is the whole training loop. After a handful of verdicts the router starts to know your taste; vv calibrate will tell you how often it agreed with you, and admit when it didn't.

What it does that nothing else does

Core principles

• Propose only, never commit. The core never writes into a knowledge base. It emits a proposal (note / task / drop). vv accept <id> --to <dir> is the one place a human turns that into a decision.
• Untrusted by default. Web material is data, never instruction.
• Never fake a judgment. No model → a source's yield is unknown, not zero. Too few verdicts → the router refuses to report a score. A tool that pretends to know is worse than one that admits it doesn't.
• Orchestrate, don't rebuild. yt-dlp, Whisper, gallery-dl, tesseract, ffmpeg — all invoked as separate programs, never bundled (see NOTICE.md).
• Local-first. The library, the ledgers and your profile never leave the machine unless you configure a hosted model — and then vv outbound logs every byte.

What it reads

Articles · videos (published captions → a timestamped transcript that links back into the video) · TikTok/Instagram/X · image galleries (OCR) · on-screen text in videos · Reddit · screenshots (OCR) · voice memos (transcribed) · PDFs and EPUBs · RSS/Atom feeds.

On video: Verivann reads the caption track — plain text, published by the platform, behind no protection. It downloads the media file only when there is no caption and only to transcribe it, then deletes it — and on platforms that protect their stream (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify…) it never does, because that would be circumvention. That rule is not a setting. See verivann/mediapolicy.py.

Capture without typing

Run it on a schedule (optional)

vv daemon --install        # prints the one line for your OS's task scheduler

Feeds, the silent-edit watchlist, and the "since you read this" banners then keep themselves current in the background. It never asks and never commits — everything it does is still a proposal.

The commands

vv                     the cockpit — what is due
setup                  connect a model, write config
serve                  the inbox in your browser
ingest-text/-url/-youtube/-file/-batch    digest something
import urls/obsidian/history              bring in what you already have
folder <dir> [--watch]                    digest a folder of files
feed add/run/list                         the editor, not the reader
question add/list/answer                  what you are trying to find out
search · ask · trace · resurface          find it, ask it, trace it back, be handed what you forgot
sources · predictions · resolve           who said it, and were they right
calibrate · bakeoff · models              how good is the router — and which model suits you
mirror · slag · bias · outbound           the honest look: hours, waste, bubble, what left the machine
claims · stale · counter                  the ledger, what has gone off, and the other side
watch add/run · refresh                   silent edits, and notes that learn what happened since
keep · drop · review · clarify · profile  teach the router (and let it ask, once)
accept --to <dir>                         the one committing act
alloy <id> <id>                           melt several sources into one
reanalyze · digest · log                  re-read with a model, the week, the furnace log
export notes/anki · backup · purge        your data: a readable folder, one portable .zip, or gone
daemon · doctor · list · dedupe · reindex housekeeping

dedupe --semantic also catches the same content re-posted under a different URL: same-source reposts are merged, cross-source echoes are flagged (that is corroboration, not a duplicate) — one threshold that keeps the credibility ledger honest.

export notes writes a plain folder of Markdown you own; backup bundles the whole library into one .zip; purge --source <key> or purge --all erases it (irreversibly, after a confirmation and a safety backup). No lock-in is not a slogan here — it is a command.

Is it private? Is it legal?

Yes to both, by design. It is local-first — no account, no telemetry, no phone-home. Sensitive material never reaches a hosted model unless you explicitly allow it, and even then it can be redacted first. It never bundles a media-downloader and never circumvents a platform's stream protection. Reading a published caption track is not media download.

Contributing & support

Verivann is free and open source under the MIT License. It is a donation-supported project with no commercial tier and no cloud service — if it is useful to you, a sponsorship keeps it going, but nothing is gated.

Issues and pull requests welcome — start with CONTRIBUTING.md for setup and the invariants that keep Verivann itself. Found a security problem? Please report it privately: SECURITY.md. Everyone is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

Docs

ARCHITECTURE.md — how it fits together · CONTRACT.md — the event/routing contract · NOTICE.md — third-party licenses · CHANGELOG.md — what shipped when