personal wiki, automatic
The Personal Wiki Software That Builds Itself
Every personal wiki dies the same way: you stop maintaining it. screenpipe skips the manual part. It captures what you see, read, and hear on your own machine, so your knowledge base is already written by the time you need to look something up.
Source-available · local-first · backed by Y Combinator
You never wrote a single one of these down. screenpipe captured them as you worked, so your personal wiki is already up to date when you go looking.
What is a personal wiki?
A personal wiki is a private knowledge base you build for yourself: linked notes, references, and research that only you edit. Tools like Notion, Obsidian, and TiddlyWiki are popular examples. The catch is that every page is written and maintained by hand, so a personal wiki is only as current as your last manual update.
The idea is great. A single place to recall what you have learned, decided, and read is exactly what most knowledge workers want. The problem is never the concept. It is the upkeep.
Why most personal wikis die
Most personal wikis fail for one reason: manual upkeep. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has used Obsidian or Notion. You set up an elaborate wiki, add pages for a few weeks, then stop. The knowledge you actually see and read every day never gets written down, so the wiki drifts out of date and you go back to searching your browser history and Slack.
A personal wiki needs regular updates to stay useful. Automatic capture records the work you might otherwise forget to add.
manual wiki vs screenpipe
A personal wiki that builds itself
screenpipe records screen and audio locally so you can search what you have read, watched, and discussed. It gives AI agents access to that history and keeps a record without requiring you to write wiki pages by hand.
Is a self-building personal wiki private?
screenpipe is local-first. In local-only mode, captured data stays on the device. Optional cloud AI, sync, connectors, exports, and team workflows are separate deployment choices you turn on yourself. That means your personal wiki can run entirely on your own machine, which matters when it holds everything you have read and worked on.
Because the core engine is source-available, you can inspect exactly what it captures and where it goes. A knowledge base that records your day should be one you can audit.
Keep a personal wiki from your recorded work
screenpipe's source-available core engine and CLI can be built and run locally. The signed desktop app uses paid plans, while the underlying capture and search stack remains inspectable and locally runnable.
You can still keep Obsidian or Notion for the pages you genuinely want to author. screenpipe fills the gap underneath them: the everyday context you would never sit down to write.
Stop maintaining your wiki. Let it maintain itself.
Install screenpipe and keep working. Search the history when you need to find something you saw or read.