LocalBrainAutopilot is the background worker that keeps your vault structured. It is off by default. You turn it on when you are ready to let LocalBrain maintain your notes for you.
What it does
As you work, Autopilot fills in useful metadata (a type, a title, tags, a short summary), links related notes to each other, and when it sees a meeting transcript it extracts the decisions and action items. It only ever writes to a note's frontmatter. Your body text is never rewritten.
Turn it on
Open Settings and enable Autopilot. It needs an API key, since it calls a model to understand your notes.
When it runs
Autopilot works on two rhythms: a short moment after you finish editing a note, and a gentle background sweep that picks up files changed outside the app, for example by Obsidian or a coding agent. The sweep processes only a few files at a time and skips notes it has already handled, so it stays quiet and cheap.
What it will not touch
- Notes you have marked as protected, or anything matched by a
.localbrainignorefile. - A note you are actively editing with unsaved changes.
- Its own generated files, so it never loops on its own output.
A note on cost
Autopilot uses your own API key, so it spends tokens as it works. It processes in small batches and skips unchanged notes to keep that modest, but the spend is yours and under your control. Turn it off any time in Settings.