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Visual Notes

A markdown note ingestion and visualization app with embeddings, UMAP projections, and a visual canvas

2026SolidStart, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL, OpenAI, Data Visualization

Visual Notes interface

Visual Notes is an app for ingesting markdown documents, storing them as structured records, and exploring them visually. The project started with a minimal markdown ingest flow and grew into an embeddings and UMAP-backed canvas for arranging notes by semantic similarity.

Interface

Visual Notes markdown ingest and document viewer interface

How it works

Visual Notes treats markdown as source material for a searchable and visual note workspace:

  • Ingests markdown through API routes or the client form.
  • Converts markdown to normalized HTML for document viewing.
  • Persists documents with Prisma and PostgreSQL.
  • Computes OpenAI embeddings for stored documents.
  • Trains UMAP projections and stores 2D or 3D point layouts.
  • Uses the latest UMAP run to position notes on the visual canvas.

Highlights

  • Minimal end-to-end markdown ingest and viewer flow
  • Embedding runs with model and dimension metadata
  • UMAP train and project workflows with persisted artifacts
  • Canvas visualization backed by semantic note positions
  • Docker Compose setup for Postgres and the app

November 2, 2026 · Feature

Voice memos that turn into searchable notes

Visual Notes now transcribes every recording on a note into a title, summary, timed sections, and tasks that search, embeddings, and agents can all read. Groq Whisper keeps it at about $0.04 an hour.

October 26, 2026 · Update

Moving Visual Notes to SolidStart 2, and what broke along the way

Dropping vinxi for Vite 8 cut the Visual Notes build from 292s to 49s on a 2-CPU box. The port itself was small. The breakage was at the boundaries: auth, server function IDs, WebSockets, and the dev server port.

October 25, 2026 · Update

Cleaning up 6,300 notes, from decision models to a working review queue

How my own labels changed Visual Notes cleanup from deletion to distillation, what Jev suggested across the collection, and what production verification caught.

October 23, 2026 · Experiment

Out of memory with too many agent sessions, and why Panda 2 didn't fix it

Freeing memory on an 18 GB Mac running many Claude Code sessions, turning the cleanup into a skill, then measuring where the TypeScript memory goes and testing whether a Panda CSS 2 upgrade reduces it. It did not.