agentic mode

bring your own AI.

longbook is a folder of plain files. that means an AI you already use can read it and help you fill it — you don’t type every renewal by hand, you talk. longbook doesn’t ship an AI and doesn’t want your keys; you bring the assistant you already trust, and the vault explains itself to it (there’s an llms.txt inside that teaches the format, the etiquette, and how to sign its work).

getting started

1. in settings, open agentic mode and copy the prompt. 2. paste it into your AI and point it at your vault. 3. talk — read it a bank statement, a pile of receipts, or a year of renewals from memory.

you stay in control: everything your AI adds shows up under changes. keep what’s right, undo what isn’t. an AI writing your financial records is only ever a suggestion until you approve it.

start by just talking

dictate your commitments out loud — the subscriptions you remember, the premiums, the EMIs, the school fees. a spoken brain-dump is the fastest way to seed a financial memory, and your AI turns it into clean entries you review in the app.

point it at your bank statements

that pile of statement PDFs and CSVs in your Downloads folder is full of recurring charges. ask your AI to go through them and pull out everything that comes back on a schedule — it adds each one with the amount, the cycle, and the date the statement actually shows.

let it read your renewal emails

“your receipt from…”, “your plan renews on…” — if your AI can search your Apple Mail or Gmail, it can harvest those into financial_memory.json directly. your mail, your AI, your machine — longbook itself never sees an inbox.

correct it like a person

correct it in plain words — “that’s yearly, not monthly”, “that one’s cancelled” — and it edits the file while you approve. and it never sends your vault anywhere: it reads the same local folder you do.

skin the dashboard

the app’s brains and pixels are deliberately separated: every figure comes from a shared core, and the interface is just a renderer over it. ask your AI to build you a different one — your own dashboard layout, your own colours, your own idea of what the money should look like — without touching a single calculation.

build on the math & grammar engines

the math engine is the core’s date-and-money machinery: real charges reconstructed on their real days, currencies never blended, renewals rolled forward correctly across month-ends and trials. the grammar engine is the voice: the casing rules and the lint ratchets that keep every word consistent. both ship in the open codebase — build your tools on top of them instead of reinventing them wrong.

hand the docs to your AI and keep going

the repository ships with developer docs — the architecture, the vault format, the engines, how to build from source. connect them into your AI and it starts where we left off: it knows the contract, the rules, and the reasons, and can carry your fork or your feature from there. the longbook repository →

one ask

if you build something on longbook — a skin, a tool, an import pipeline — a visible credit and a link back to longbook.app would mean a lot. longbook is made by one person, and being found is how an independent app survives.

agentic mode is in the app today — settings → agentic mode. more questions answered →