Why it exists
Having an agent maintain, migrate, and query a real Markdown vault took 20–30 minutes of tool calls per task — and something was always missed. Frontmatter querying, in particular, had no good tool. norn is the deterministic layer underneath: humans write freely, agents handle the maintenance, and the graph answers in one call instead of dozens.
The thesis is a chain — rules make the vault consistent, consistency makes queries accurate, accurate queries cut agent turns, and fewer turns mean less drift. Consistency is the end; agent-efficiency is the mechanism.
What it does
- Query like a database — filter by frontmatter, trace backlinks, find unresolved links, search across documents.
- Frontmatter as a contract — declare required fields, allowed values, and shapes per note type; norn enforces them.
- Validate in one pass — every convention violation surfaced with stable, filterable codes.
- Repair deterministically — a reviewable plan, then an apply step. No model rewrites your notes.
- One core, two surfaces — the same primitives as a CLI and an MCP server, so agents inherit the dry-run, confirm, and audit for free.
Plan, then apply
Mutation is never a black box. norn produces a schema-versioned, inspectable repair plan and only changes files when you apply it. The division of labor is deliberate: the agent decides, norn enumerates. No model sits in the loop rewriting prose — which is exactly what makes the result predictable enough to trust.