Chronicle is an AI biographer that helps people understand, document, challenge, and preserve their life story.
Most software helps you remember.
Chronicle helps you understand.
Chronicle transforms documents, conversations, photos, memories, journals, and life experiences into a living, evidence-backed narrative. It discovers themes, surfaces contradictions, asks better questions, and helps create memoirs, manifestos, essays, and legacy artifacts while preserving provenance and voice.
apps/
chronicle-web/ Next.js frontend
services/
chronicle-api/ Spring Boot API
modules/
chronicle-domain/ Core domain model
chronicle-application/ Application services and ports
chronicle-infrastructure/ Persistence, adapters, migrations, providers
chronicle-ingestion/ Artifact ingestion pipeline
docs/
openapi/
docker-compose.yml
Most people leave behind thousands of pages of material:
- Documents
- Photos
- Emails
- Journals
- Notes
- Projects
- Conversations
- Social media posts
Yet very little of it becomes understanding.
Chronicle was created to answer questions that traditional note-taking systems cannot:
- Who am I?
- How did I become this person?
- What patterns define my life?
- What beliefs have changed?
- What lessons have I learned?
- What should survive after I'm gone?
Chronicle is not:
- A chatbot
- A journal
- A note-taking application
- A document search engine
- A generic RAG platform
Chronicle is an AI Biographer.
It maintains multiple perspectives on a life:
What happened.
What Chronicle believes.
Who shaped the story.
What story is emerging.
Over time, memories become observations.
Observations become hypotheses.
Hypotheses become themes.
Themes become chapters.
Chapters become books.
Chronicle is in active development.
Current MVP:
Upload artifact
→ Extract text
→ Chunk content
→ Create memory candidates
→ Generate observations
→ Generate hypotheses
→ Generate questions
→ Generate chapter draft
The truthful scope is intentionally small. Upload is the only working product surface. Studio, Notebook, Books, and Settings are prototype or mock surfaces, and the rest is deferred roadmap work.
- 00-current-mvp.md
- 01-vision.md
- 02-product-requirements.md
- 03-biographer-memory.md
- 04-system-architecture.md
- 05-database-design.md
- 06-api-design.md
- 07-ingestion-pipeline.md
- 08-writing-studio.md
- 09-biographer-notebook.md
- 10-roadmap.md
- 11-local-development.md
The Chronicle UI lives in apps/chronicle-web.
cd apps/chronicle-web
npm install
npm run devThe frontend currently opens on the Upload experience.
Production build:
cd apps/chronicle-web
npm run buildcp .env.example .env
docker compose up --buildThe API starts on:
http://localhost:8080
Flyway automatically bootstraps the database schema on startup.
Chronicle should be able to spend years with a person.
Reading.
Listening.
Remembering.
Questioning.
Connecting ideas across decades.
Over time it becomes more than software.
It becomes a witness.
And eventually, a record of a life.