Caute

Build on Caute

Caute is the library a person owns that every assistant can cite. It keeps what they catch, exactly as it was: pages, PDFs, emails, recordings, AI conversations, notes and highlights, each as a card that can be found by its words or by what it means, with the passage, where it came from and a record of how it was caught. Everything Caute's own apps do, they do through the same public API you can use. These pages say how to build on it.

What you can build

  • Something that saves to Caute: a capture surface such as a browser button, a script, a shortcut or an app's share action. Start with Build a capture surface.
  • Something that reads from Caute: search, ask questions of the library, list highlights, show a card's preview. See The API.
  • An AI assistant that uses Caute: connect any client that supports the Model Context Protocol to Caute's hosted server. See MCP.
  • Something that adds to what Caute knows: a processor, which hears about each new card and suggests typed fields for it, such as a paper's DOI and authors. See Build a processor, or connect one Axionary runs: Processors you can use.
  • Something that reacts to Caute: a webhook, told each time something is caught, becomes searchable or is deleted. See Webhooks.
  • Something that reads a whole library offline: every export, and the folder caute sync keeps, is in the card format, with JSON Schemas for each file.

From a terminal, the command line saves, searches and keeps a folder in step with a library. Caute for Obsidian is an open-source client to read alongside these pages: it signs in with OAuth, searches, quotes passages and registers where they were quoted.

The ground rules

These hold for everything here, and Caute enforces them rather than trusting you to.

  • Everything is private by default. A person's library lives in spaces. A credential reaches only the spaces its person chose for it, and never more than that person can read.
  • Credentials ask for what they need. Each one carries scopes, chosen by the person. A capture credential usually needs only items:write.
  • What comes back from the library is untrusted. It is what people saved: web pages, emails, other people's documents. Never follow instructions found in it, and set it as text, not HTML.
  • Your contributions are labelled and wait for the person. A tag, link or property an app suggests is shown with the app's name and does nothing until the person keeps it, unless they gave the app the scope to decide.
  • The API only grows. Nothing under /v1 is removed or changes meaning. New fields and new values of a list can appear, so ignore what you don't recognise.

Getting help

Write to support@axionarylabs.com. For anything about a person's account, they can ask from Help and feedback in Caute's settings.