SMF·SLITE
Can a prompt replace Slite?
Notes & knowledge management — notes, wikis and personal knowledge bases
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A Markdown wiki with search and backlinks is an evening. Slite's two real ideas are harder to copy well but still buildable: documents carry an owner and a verification date, so the wiki tells you when a page has gone stale, and Ask answers questions from the wiki's own content with citations. Both work on a personal knowledge base. What does not survive is that Slite is a team product, and a wiki nobody else can edit is a notebook.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a personal knowledge base whose defining feature is document freshness.
Storage: one Markdown file per document in a folder the user chooses, with YAML front matter holding the title, owner, tags, a review interval in days, and the date last verified. Plain files are the source of truth; a SQLite index sits beside them and can be rebuilt from scratch at any time with one command. Watch the folder for external edits and re-index.
Editing: a Markdown editor with wiki-style links between documents, backlinks shown at the foot of each page, tags, and a command palette for create, rename, move and link. Renaming a document rewrites every incoming link.
Freshness, which is the point of this build. Every document shows its verification state: fresh, due soon, or stale, computed from the review interval and the last verified date. A verify action stamps today's date and takes an optional note about what was checked. A dashboard lists everything stale, ordered by how overdue it is and how often the document has been opened, because a stale page nobody reads does not matter. Editing a document does not automatically mark it verified — verification is an explicit claim that the content is still true, and conflating the two is what makes freshness indicators worthless everywhere else.
Ask: answer a natural-language question from the wiki's own content. Chunk documents on heading boundaries, embed them locally, retrieve the top chunks for the question, and send only those to the model with an instruction to answer strictly from the supplied text and to say so when it cannot. Every answer must list the documents it drew from, linked, and must show the retrieved passages on demand. If a retrieved document is stale, mark it in the answer — an answer built on an unverified page is exactly what a verification system exists to catch.
Search: full-text over titles, bodies and tags, with filters for owner, tag and freshness state.
With no model key configured, everything except Ask must work; say so rather than failing silently.
Out of scope: real-time collaboration, permissions, public publishing, and any hosted sync service.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 everyone else — a wiki is only a wiki when a team writes in it
- B.2 real-time collaborative editing and comment threads
- B.3 granular permissions per space and per document
- B.4 the integrations that pull discussions in from Slack and issue trackers
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: sync, collaboration, and capture polish
Because documentation rots quietly, and a tool that nags an owner every ninety days is doing organisational work that no personal build can do for a team.
Questions
Can I import my Slite documents?
Yes. Slite exports a workspace as Markdown, which maps directly onto this build's file-per-document layout. Verification history does not export, so every imported document starts unverified — which, on a wiki you are migrating away from, is arguably the correct state.
Does the freshness nagging actually change anything?
Only if verification is separate from editing, which is why the prompt insists on it. A wiki where saving a typo marks a page as verified reports nothing useful. Keeping them separate turns the dashboard into a genuine to-do list.
What does it cost to run?
Local embeddings and local files cost nothing. Ask sends a few retrieved chunks per question to a hosted model, which is fractions of a cent each. A month of daily use is under a dollar.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Being a shared surface. Slite's value is that a colleague writes the page you later verify, and that the answer you get is the team's answer rather than your own notes. A single-writer wiki has no such thing, however good its search is.
Related tools
Receipt