v0.4.0 — Cortex finds you, not the other way around

Pivoted hard from the ROADMAP-as-written. The original v0.4 scope was code signing and themes; the actual v0.4 is the inversion that v0.3's MCP server kicked off — Cortex stops waiting to be opened. See docs/V04-THINKING.md for the full reasoning.

Privacy-first desktop app: captures AI conversations from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini into a local knowledge graph. Nothing leaves your machine.

What changed

• cortex CLI — a real terminal companion. cortex search "auth flow", cortex recent --tag rust --limit 20, cortex digest, cortex export <id>, cortex stats, cortex tags, cortex pin <id>, cortex unpin <id>, cortex pinned. Pipeable (snippet-only output on non-TTY for | grep, | head), greppable, opens the same FTS5 + sqlite-vec + Ollama stack the MCP server uses. Both Bash (cli/cortex) and CMD (cli/cortex.cmd) launchers ship; npm run cortex -- <cmd> works locally without PATH setup.
• Local Ollama summarization with llama3.2:3b (or CORTEX_SUMMARY_MODEL). Two summaries per memory — one-line (≤20 words) and paragraph (≤80 words) — cached in memory_summaries keyed on content hash. Stale summaries invalidate when content changes. Generation is null-safe: Ollama down ⇒ silent no-op, same pattern as embeddings.
• MCP server v0.4: bandwidth fix + three new tools. cortex_search and cortex_get_memory return one-line / paragraph summaries instead of raw content, dropping the typical search-result payload from ~600 lines of raw chat to ~60 lines of distilled summary. Three new tools: cortex_digest, cortex_pinned, cortex_pin. Pinned memories are prepended to every cortex_search envelope. Tools went 6 → 9.
• Daily / weekly digest (cortex digest + in-app view, Ctrl+4). Groups recent captures by top tag, surfaces one-line summaries, clickable in the app to drill into the editor. Two-second read on the CLI for morning-coffee use.
• Pinned memories — per-memory star toggle in the detail panel; pinned set surfaces at the top of the sidebar and prepends to every MCP search response. The "user-IS" surface the 13 seed memories revealed was missing.
• Medium-zoom edge LOD fix — graph perf top-up. Edge strength threshold rises with visible-edge count; mention edges drop above 4k visible nodes. Buys back the one remaining sad zoom band from v0.3.
• Schema v7 — memory_summaries table + memories.pinned column + idx_memories_pinned. Forward-only, idempotent, runs at first launch.

Why this scope, not the ROADMAP's

The original v0.4 ROADMAP was distribution + polish: code signing ($300/yr), Linux AppImage, auto-update, dark/light themes, accessibility, keyboard graph navigation. All of that is future table-stakes — and none of it makes Cortex genuinely indispensable to someone using it daily. Per docs/V04-THINKING.md:

The product is half-passive on intake and fully active on retrieval. A second brain that waits to be asked is a filing cabinet. The thing it needs to become is the thing that finds me.

The CLI is the highest-leverage single thing I can ship — terminal users will reach cortex search 20× a day, never the Electron window. The summarization makes the MCP server's output composable with limited LLM contexts. The digest makes the app a habit instead of a tool. Pinning gives the user an explicit "always-relevant context" surface.

Verified this release

• 434/434 unit + integration tests green (399 → 434, +35 across summarize/digest/MCP/CLI).
• MCP smoke harness: 14/14 checks (handshake → 9-tool list → search → digest → pinned → create → error paths).
• CLI verified live against the real DB: cortex stats, cortex search (semantic mode), cortex tags, cortex help all produce correct output.
• npm run build clean across all three processes + worker chunk.

Stack

Electron 31 · React 18 · TypeScript 5 · Tailwind 3 · better-sqlite3 12 · sqlite-vec 0.1 · Fastify 5 · D3 7 · Zustand 4 · Vitest 4 · local Ollama (all-minilm 384d for embeddings, llama3.2:3b for summarization, both optional with graceful degradation). 434/434 tests passing.