Remry is out. It’s a free, local notebook that Claude keeps for you. This post is the longer story of why it exists - the one I’ll point to when someone asks “why not just use Notion?”
I oversee six teams. That’s a lot of people, projects, goals and half-remembered 1:1 conversations to carry around in one head. And I’m terrible at planning ahead.
That combination is the whole reason Remry exists. Before a meeting I don’t have time to work out where a note should go according what I set up three months ago. I need to say the thing and have it land in the right place. Then, when review season comes round, I need it all to be there.
I tried the obvious tools first.
Starting with Notion
I started in Notion, and I still think it gets a lot right. I ran a Notion workspace for 300+ people, so I can say I was something of an authority.
For me, most of Notion’s value is in a few things:
Databases: A person, a project and a goal are records with fields, and you can create, update and filter them like any other database.
Relations and rollups: A project links to its owner, a team rolls up its projects, and you can see the whole thing from either end.
Peek: Open a record in a side panel without losing your place in the list. It’s the feature I missed most when I left.
The trouble is that it needs to be built and maintained , and is meant for a team. For one person it’s too expensive and frankly, overkill.
Obsidian: local, but DIY
So I moved to Obsidian. A few things won me over:
Local-first by default. Your notes are files that never leave your computer. This is important from an enterprise security perspective when selecting tools. And it matters more than it used to - more on that below.
Markdown first. Everything is a plain markdown file, which any model can read and write. That’s why Obsidian has been the default for LLM wikis so far.
The Excalidraw plugin. One of my favourite things about it. Although Excalidraw is available pretty much everywhere now.
But Obsidian is basic, even with all its plugins. A page is a markdown file, and seeing anything useful about a person or a project means hopping between files and hoping the links hold up. I don’t want to hop between pages to find all the relevant info.
It’s also finicky. You build everything yourself - the folder conventions, the templates, the Dataview queries, the plugin combinations that work until one of them updates. I don’t have time to maintain all that while running six teams.
And no, Confluence and Google Docs weren’t the answer either. Both are deeply awkward - fine for the team’s shared documents, painful for keeping your own structured view of things.
What I actually needed
By this point the list was pretty clear:
Batteries included: People, teams, projects, goals and docs, already there and already linked. No templates to design, no plugins to babysit.
A structure I already know works: Running that 300-person Notion workspace taught me which structures hold up - permanent docs vs. temporary plans, everything tied to an owning team, a snapshot view for leadership. Most businesses end up with something close to that pattern, so I built it in rather than making everyone rediscover it.
More on one page: A person’s page should show their lead, their teams, their todos, my dated notes and the docs that mention them. Plus side-peek - that was amazing.
Local-first: Security is tightening everywhere, and it’s strictest at bigger companies. Those are also the places where someone overseeing several teams needs a tool like this. Files on your own machine, no accounts and no sync is a much easier conversation with a security team.
A proper view of my reports: Goals can sync in from wherever the team tracks them, and they sit next to my own notes and observations. When review time comes, most of the digging is already done.
That last one is the one that saves me the most time. Writing reviews used to mean an evening of scrolling back through months of notes. Now it’s a prompt.
So I built Remry
We’re in a markdown-first world now. Every model reads and writes markdown well, and that’s a big part of why most LLM wikis so far sit on top of Obsidian. I wanted to keep that, and add a better way to organize and connect the files. Plenty of people have had a go at this - see any of the second brain wikis out there.
Remry is my take. It’s a local notebook with the structure built in, and Claude does the filing over MCP. Before a meeting I say “note that Dana wants to lead the migration, remind me to book a 1:1” and it lands on Dana’s page - dated, in my words, with the todo above it. I don’t have to remember where things go, that’s delegated out now.
So it’s Notion’s databases lovable UI, on Obsidian’s local markdown files, without the setup, using a format I know works for most organizations. Which is roughly what I’d have asked for two years ago, but now I can build fast, and exactly how I want it.
Summary
Notion has the right ideas - databases, relations, rollups, peek - but it’s too expensive and too much for one person.
Obsidian is markdown-first and local-first, and has Excalidraw. But it’s basic and very DIY.
Confluence and Google Docs are awkward - enough said.
Remry is a local, batteries-included notebook built for the classic org structure, and Claude is the one keeping it organized and up to date.
This is the first public release, so a few rough edges: the Mac build is Apple silicon only, Windows will show a warning because the installer isn’t signed just yet (incoming shortly!), and the code is source-available (FSL), not open source. If setup trips you up anywhere, open an issue on GitHub - that’s what I’m fixing first. For anything else, there’s the contact form.
If you carry a lot in your head too, download Remry. To follow along as it changes, subscribe to the newsletter.