Your brain dumps, distilled into Markdown

What it does

NoteGen is a cross-platform Markdown note app that treats thinking as a two-stage pipeline. A Recording space swallows screenshots, links, clips, and raw brain dumps without asking for structure; a Notes editor then lets you refine those fragments into clean Markdown with tables, diagrams, and math. An AI Dialogue panel tags along to rewrite, translate, and organize content using memory pulled from your own knowledge base. Everything lives as local Markdown files first, with optional sync to GitHub, S3, WebDAV, or Gitea.

The interesting bit

The app does not treat AI as a fancy spell-checker. It ships with built-in RAG, vector indexing, and hybrid retrieval, so the model can actually search and reference your past notes instead of hallucinating context. It also supports MCP, which means it can talk to external tool ecosystems rather than locking you into a single vendor’s sandbox.

Key highlights

• Local-first Markdown storage with sync to GitHub, GitLab, S3, WebDAV, and Gitea.
• Built-in knowledge base with RAG and vector indexing—no external vector database required.
• Extensible AI stack via MCP, custom models, prompts, and agent workflows.
• Image workflow covers capture, OCR, description, hosting, and reuse inside notes.
• Desktop is beta; Android and iOS are alpha.

Caveats

• Mobile support is alpha, so phones and tablets are still experimental.
• The README advertises “free AI model services” from a partner, but it is unclear whether the app can run fully offline or if it requires API keys for core AI features.

Verdict

A solid candidate for developers who want an Obsidian-like, Markdown-native vault with AI and retrieval baked in from day one. If you need polished mobile apps or guaranteed offline LLM inference, wait a few releases.