Warning
This project is in an experimental stage. APIs and file formats may change without notice.
A methodology that gives structure to R&D exploration through an AI-maintained evolving knowledge graph -- without killing the exploration itself.
Too much structure suffocates research. Too little structure evaporates it. Existing approaches each solve one piece -- Zettelkasten gives bottom-up emergence, HDD gives hypothesis testing, DDP gives risk prioritization -- but none of them track the relationships between what you know, what you don't know, and what to explore next. EMDD fills that gap: it is a lightweight, AI-maintained knowledge graph that structures your exploration as it happens, surfaces blind spots, and remembers every dead end so you never walk it twice.
- Solo researchers or small teams doing exploratory R&D where the destination is unknown -- visual inspection R&D, architecture spikes, open-ended investigations.
- Developers working with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code) who want the AI to maintain the knowledge structure while they retain judgment.
- Anyone who has lost track of what they tried last week, why they abandoned an approach, or which assumptions remain untested.
- Teams that need more rigor than a scratchpad but less overhead than a project management system.
- Researchers who want to know what to explore next, not just what they have already done.
EMDD = Zettelkasten's bottom-up emergence
+ DDP's risk-first validation
+ InfraNodus's structural gap detection
+ Graphiti's temporal evolution
─────────────────────────────────
Autonomous maintenance and suggestions by an AI agent
Delegate cognitive load to the graph and the AI, but never delegate judgment.
EMDD has three roles. The Researcher exercises taste and judgment -- deciding which directions are worth pursuing, creating hypotheses, and making intuitive leaps the graph cannot derive on its own. The Graph is the living knowledge structure: a map of what is known, what remains unknown, and what has been tried. The Agent (AI) is the graph's gardener -- maintaining connections, detecting patterns and gaps, and suggesting what to explore next. Suggestions are always suggestions, never decisions.
| Node Type | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Knowledge | Confirmed facts, literature, domain rules |
| Hypothesis | Testable claims with confidence scores and kill criteria |
| Experiment | Units of work that validate or refute hypotheses |
| Finding | Facts or patterns discovered from experiments (observations, insights, negatives) |
| Question | Open research questions that need answers |
| Decision | Recorded decisions with rationale and alternatives considered |
| Episode | Record of one exploration session -- what was tried, what is next |
Question ──> Hypothesis ──> Experiment ──> Finding
│
┌───────────────┤
v v
Knowledge New Question
(promoted) (the cycle continues)
Hypotheses move through PROPOSED -> TESTING -> SUPPORTED / REFUTED / REVISED. Findings accumulate evidence. When a Finding has sufficient independent support, it is promoted to Knowledge. Refuted hypotheses are preserved -- the knowledge of why something failed is itself knowledge.
npm install -g @beomjk/emddOr use directly with npx:
npx @beomjk/emdd <command># Initialize an EMDD project
emdd init my-research
# Create your first nodes
cd my-research
emdd new question "what-causes-defects"
emdd new hypothesis "surface-cracks-from-stress"
# Link them
emdd link hyp-001 qst-001 spawned_from
# Check graph health
emdd lint
emdd healthSee the Quick Start Guide for a full walkthrough.
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
emdd init [path] |
Initialize a new EMDD project (--tool claude|cursor|windsurf|cline|copilot|all, --lang en|ko) |
emdd list [path] |
List nodes (--type, --status filters) |
emdd new <type> <slug> |
Create a node (hypothesis, experiment, finding, ...) |
emdd link <source> <target> <relation> |
Add a link between nodes |
emdd update <node-id> --set key=value |
Update node frontmatter |
emdd done <episode-id> "<item>" |
Mark an episode item with a status marker (--marker <done|deferred|superseded>) |
emdd lint [path] |
Validate schema and link integrity |
emdd health [path] |
Show graph health dashboard (--all) |
emdd check [path] |
Check consolidation triggers |
emdd promote [path] |
Identify promotion candidates |
emdd backlog [path] |
List incomplete items across all episodes (--status <pending|done|deferred|superseded|all>) |
emdd index [path] |
Generate _index.md |
emdd graph [path] |
Generate _graph.mmd (Mermaid) |
emdd confidence [path] |
Propagate confidence across the graph |
emdd transitions [path] |
Detect recommended status transitions |
emdd kill-check [path] |
Check kill criteria status for hypotheses |
emdd branches [path] |
List and analyze branch groups |
emdd serve [path] |
Start web dashboard server (-p, --port, --no-open) |
emdd export-html [output] |
Export graph as standalone HTML file (--layout force|hierarchical, --types, --statuses) |
emdd mcp |
Start MCP server (stdio transport) |
The init command supports --lang en|ko for bilingual project setup.
You do not need to adopt everything at once. Start lite and add structure as you need it.
| Phase | Duration | Node Types | Daily Overhead | You're doing it right when... |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | Week 1-2 | 4 (Hypothesis, Experiment, Finding, Episode) | ~15 min | You can open last week's Episode and immediately know what to do next |
| Standard | Week 3-4 | 6 (+Knowledge, Question) | ~25 min | Findings regularly get promoted to Knowledge |
| Full | Week 5+ | 7 (+Decision, all edge types, all ceremonies) | ~45 min | The graph tells you what to explore next |
See section 11 of the specification for details on each phase.
- EMDD in 5 Minutes -- copy-paste tutorial
- Quick Start Guide -- get started in 15 minutes
- Example Graph -- a complete 14-node research narrative
- Full Specification -- the complete methodology
- Philosophy -- why EMDD exists
- Operations -- research loops, ceremonies, adoption
- Tool Comparison -- EMDD vs. Obsidian, Zettelkasten, DDP, HDD, nbdev, and more
- Glossary -- definitions of all EMDD terms
- 한국어 스펙 -- Korean specification
- Not a project management tool. No deadlines, no progress percentages -- it tracks what you know and what you don't.
- Not a knowledge base. The value is in the tensions, contradictions, and gaps between information, not in tidy organization.
- Not SDD with a graph bolted on. Direction emerges from exploration; the specification does not come first.
- Not a personal knowledge management system. It is project-scoped working memory, not a second brain for a lifetime.
- Not outsourcing research to AI. The AI prunes branches and points to empty ground. The researcher decides where to walk.
Contributions are welcome -- whether that is trying EMDD on your own project and reporting what worked, proposing changes to the spec, or building tooling. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and the RFC process.