Field Notes

A private offline journal and safety companion for psychedelic and other substance experiences.

Field Notes is a journal that understands what a session is. Write plain diary entries or log an experience as it happens — what you took, how much, and how you're feeling over time. Before you combine substances, check them against a built-in reference of known dangerous combinations. During a session, a calm AI companion is there to talk — it runs entirely on your machine, so the conversation never leaves the room.

There are no accounts, no cloud, and no network requests. Your journal can be encrypted with a password, and nothing you write is ever scanned, analyzed, or sent anywhere. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with optional access from your phone.

⚠️ Harm-reduction and journaling tool — not medical advice, and not encouragement to use anything. Dose and interaction information is a reference and safety backstop only: incomplete, possibly wrong, and no substitute for a qualified clinician. The interaction checker flags only some well-known dangerous combinations — absence of a warning does not mean a combination is safe. In an emergency, contact local emergency services or poison control.

Features

• Journal — log experiences with intention, set & setting, doses, and a running timeline of how you feel. Edit, delete, or backdate anything. Logging something that already happened is a first-class option — tick "this already happened" on a new session and it's saved as a finished trip, with doses defaulting to when it occurred rather than now. Every timestamp in a session also shows the time since your first dose (14:02 (t+1:23)), so the timeline reads against the clock that matters. A session you never got round to titling takes the name of the first substance you log into it, so nothing sits in the journal as "Untitled" — rename it whenever you like.
• Plain notes — not everything is a session. Write ordinary journal entries (a title, your words, a date) alongside them.
• Combination warnings — every dose is checked against the others for well-documented dangerous combinations, and there's a standalone checker to consult before taking anything.
• Dose reference — dose ranges, durations, and graded interaction data for hundreds of substances, bundled with the app and available offline. Search the reference prose, or read any of the 575 substance entries in full — pharmacology, harm potential, tolerance, legality — with the exact dose figures alongside. Sourced from DoseWiki (public domain).
• Companion — a calm, non-judgmental support chat that runs on a local AI model. It can be aware of your current session, look up references, and log things for you when you ask. Pick a support style ("just listen", "keep me grounded", …) and it honors it. It loads in the background so the window never freezes while it thinks, and it tells you up front if your machine is short on memory to run the model. It's improving but still rough in places — see Companion quality. You can also turn it off entirely and use everything else.
• Live session — a quiet, altered-state-friendly screen for an ongoing experience: elapsed time, one-tap logging, the companion, and an always-visible Get help now button. Timeline notes can be edited after the fact — on the desktop and from the phone.
• Crisis resources — if a chat with the Companion shows signs of crisis, or a dangerous combination is logged, real emergency and peer-support contacts appear. This is driven by fixed rules, never by the AI — and your journal writing is never scanned.
• Import from text — paste a past experience in any form, from a one-line note to a full trip report with T+ timestamps, and the local model pulls out the substances, doses, and timeline into a structured entry you review before saving.
• Reference search — search thousands of passages of substance information (pharmacology, tolerance, legality) offline.
• Encryption & backups — optional password encryption for the whole journal, plus one-file backup and restore.
• Obsidian sync — export entries to an Obsidian vault as readable Markdown notes and import them back; works both ways, fully offline. Any single entry can also be exported on its own ("Export this entry" on the desktop, "Export" on the phone) in the same format, so it drops straight into a vault.
• Phone access (optional, off by default) — pair your phone and use the journal, combo checker, reference, and Companion from bed at 3am. The desktop shows a green "Paired successfully" light the moment the phone first uses the code, so you're not left guessing whether the scan took. Companion replies run as a background job on the desktop, so a slow local model — or a locked phone screen — no longer drops the answer. Starting a session from the phone takes an optional title — or leave it blank and the first substance you log names it. Rename a session or entry right from the phone by tapping its title. Private by design: see Architecture for how.
• Substance catalogue & log — keep your own substance list with notes, and review your history grouped by substance.
• Contribute upstream (consent-gated) — export substances you've catalogued that DoseWiki doesn't cover as a draft to submit by hand. Never automatic, never includes journal data.
• Send feedback — a link in Settings opens a prefilled bug report or feature request on GitHub, in your browser. Nothing is sent from the app itself.

Screenshots

Journal — sessions and plain notes in one place	Live session — elapsed time, one-tap logging, and the companion
Companion — local AI support chat with selectable support styles	Session detail — doses with inline reference ranges and combination warnings
Substances — offline dose reference and your own catalogue	Reference search — thousands of DoseWiki passages, searchable offline
Substance log — history grouped by substance	Get help now — real crisis and peer-support contacts, always one tap away
Phone access — optional, Tailscale-only, off by default	Encryption & backups — AES-256 at rest, one-file backup and restore
Obsidian sync — two-way Markdown export, fully offline	Your data, one folder — everything lives on your device, erase anytime

Install & update

Download an installer for your platform from the Releases page:

• Windows — run the -setup.exe installer (or the .msi). Not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn on first launch — click More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — open the .dmg, drag Field Notes to Applications. Not notarized yet, so on first launch right-click → Open (or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Field Notes.app").
• Linux — the .AppImage (make it executable and run), or the .deb / .rpm.

To update: the app checks for updates on launch and installs them in place ("Install & restart") — signed and verified, fully in-app. You can also install any release over the old version by hand. Your journal is safe either way — all data lives in the OS app-data directory (%APPDATA%\com.fieldnotes.journal on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/com.fieldnotes.journal on macOS, ~/.local/share/com.fieldnotes.journal on Linux), separate from the app itself, so updating never touches it.

Architecture

• Tauri 2 + Svelte (TypeScript) desktop app (Windows + macOS + Linux), built on the same stack as Cairn.
• Local SQLite (rusqlite, bundled) at the app data dir — substances, experiences (sessions and plain notes, split by an explicit kind column), doses, timeline_events. No network, no accounts. Opt-in SQLCipher encryption at rest (AES-256).
• The safety-critical layers are deterministic Rust, independent of any model — interactions.rs (interaction rules + class vocabulary, common-knowledge harm-reduction categories not derived from any copyrighted source), crisis.rs (crisis signals in Companion chat + graded resources; journal prose is never scanned — owner's decision, recorded in ROADMAP.md), pw.rs (the dose reference; snapshot + slimming pipeline in data/dosewiki/).
• knowledge.rs — BM25 over the bundled DoseWiki prose corpus (7,800+ passages, 575 substances), in-process, no embeddings.
• portal.rs — the optional phone server. Binds 127.0.0.1 only and is fronted by your Tailscale tailnet; every request needs a paired token; it refuses to serve a locked journal; and it exposes a strict allowlist — wiping the journal, the passphrase, backups, and filesystem access are unreachable from a phone by construction. Its module docs state four load-bearing rules, and tests pin all four.
• contribute.rs — upstream draft exports, with no HTTP client in the file at all.
• The AI features (Companion, text import) talk only to a local Ollama instance on 127.0.0.1 — the app can install it and download a model for you on first use.

Companion quality

The Companion is the least finished part of this app, and it's worth being straight about that. v0.9.0 made real improvements — it no longer invents durations or cites references it never read, and the default model was changed to one that will actually engage when things get hard. There's an evaluation harness (src-tauri/eval/scenarios.json, 30 scenarios) so changes are measured rather than guessed at.

It still has rough edges. It runs long when it should be brief, occasionally misses a tool call it should have made, and its register drifts from the calm, non-directive tone it's aiming for. Prompt work to address that is the next step. Quality also depends on your hardware — a small model on an older machine will be noticeably worse.

None of this touches the safety-critical layers. The interaction checker, crisis detection and dose reference are deterministic Rust that run regardless of which model is loaded, or whether one is loaded at all. If the Companion isn't earning its keep on your machine, turn it off in Settings; everything else is unaffected.

Roadmap

• Companion register — prompt restructuring and worked examples, so it stays brief and non-directive. Measured against the eval harness.
• Offline capture on the phone — log while the desktop is asleep or you're off the tailnet, with an outbox that syncs when it's reachable again. Gated on porting the deterministic safety checks to run phone-side: an offline phone whose interaction checker has gone dark is worse than no phone at all.

See ROADMAP.md for the full picture and design history.

Development

npm install
npm run tauri dev
npm run tauri build

Releases are cut per RELEASING.md.

Development notes

Things that aren't obvious from the code, and that have already cost a debugging session at least once:

• src/lib/api.ts is the only file allowed to import Tauri's invoke. It is the single seam where the desktop (invoke) and the phone (fetch to the portal) diverge, which is why the UI never had to learn that the portal exists. Import invoke anywhere else and the phone silently breaks.
• portal.rs's EXPOSED is an allowlist. A new command in commands.rs is unreachable from the phone until someone adds it there on purpose — that's the point. The four rules in that file's module docs are load-bearing; tests pin all four.
• Adding a command to EXPOSED is a security decision, not a plumbing one. Ask what it does in the hands of someone holding a phone that isn't yours. ai_start is exposed (it wakes a loopback server the app already owns); ai_install and ai_pull are not (they install software and download gigabytes).
• Known rough edge: browsing to the portal's / (rather than /m) from a phone serves the desktop page, which half-renders and throws console errors. Harmless — the allowlist is server-side — and fixed as part of Phase 3b.
• Verifying the UI without a screen. macOS may withhold Screen Recording / Accessibility, which blocks screenshots and AppleScript. Headless Chromium needs neither: point it at the running portal (http://127.0.0.1:<port>/m#t=<token>) and drive the real app over a real socket, phone viewport and all. This is how /m and the desktop Substances tab are actually verified, rather than merely typechecked.
• Two bugs got past "the tests pass" and were caught by a human on a phone — the Tailscale step being too much to ask of an end user, and the Companion tab giving up forever if Ollama was asleep at page load. Typechecks and unit tests don't open tabs. Drive the thing.
• Windows CI skips cargo test — Windows test binaries die at launch with STATUS_ENTRYPOINT_NOT_FOUND because tauri-build links the app manifest only to the main binary (tauri#13419). The shipped app is unaffected; the suite runs on macOS/Linux.

License

Licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0.

Free to use, modify, and share for non-commercial purposes (personal use, research, education, nonprofits, government). Commercial use requires a separate commercial license — a contract with the author. For commercial licensing, contact the author via github.com/sparkly-quasar.