Inputs

Sessions, articles and PDFs each have their own reader, distiller, SQLite table and vault folder. All of them embed into one vector space, so vir query searches across them with a type filter.

Claude Code sessions

The original source, and the one that’s retroactive: vir reads whatever is still under ~/.claude/projects/. Claude Code prunes transcripts after roughly 30 days, so the first run recovers history that’s about to disappear.

Sessions run through the full pipeline and land in patterns/, gotchas/, decisions/, or tools/.

Codex sessions

Since 0.26: set codexSessionsDir (vir init asks) and vir reads ~/.codex/sessions/ too: the Codex CLI, IDE extension and desktop app. The harness context Codex stores as user messages is stripped, subagent and review threads are skipped, and a project you use from both agents is one project. Codex keeps its rollouts, so there’s no pruning deadline; archived threads are not read. Details: Codex.

Web articles

Clip pages into a folder — Obsidian Web Clipper works well — and point articlesDir at it. Each clipped markdown file is classified as concept, technique, reference, or opinion and distilled into articles/<slug>.md with type: article and source_url in the frontmatter.

Distillation is copyright-bounded: never more than 15 verbatim words from the source. The slug is keyed off the URL, so re-clipping the same page overwrites its note instead of orphaning it.

{ "articlesDir": "/Users/you/Vault/clips" }

Run just this phase with vir run --articles-only. Leave articlesDir unset to keep the phase off.

PDFs and papers

Point pdfsDir at a folder of PDFs. Each is classified as paper, reference, notes, or other and distilled into pdfs/<slug>.md with type: pdf, source_path, source_title, and pages. Same copyright bound as articles.

PDFs are the expensive source — text extraction plus a full distill per file — and the daemon has no cost gate on this phase. The recommended posture is manual only:

# set pdfsDir in config.json, then
vir run --pdfs-only --dry-run    # this IS the cost check — no interactive prompt
vir run --pdfs-only
# optionally unset pdfsDir again

Where things land

vault/vir/
  patterns/  gotchas/  decisions/  tools/   # sessions (Claude Code and Codex)
  articles/                                 # web clips
  pdfs/                                     # papers
  topics/                                   # vir compose syntheses
  projects/                                 # per-project summaries
  summaries/                                # weekly/monthly, never indexed
  archived/                                 # dedupe losers, kept