Choosing a backend

ResearchVault writes canonical bundles to raw/. Turning those into a wiki is a separate job, done by a backend you configure in wiki-backend.toml in your vault root.

Two properties that matter

Locality — local or cloud. A cloud backend sends bundle content (paper text, transcripts, your notes) to a third-party API. A local backend does not.

Invocation — cli or session. A cli backend can be driven entirely by a subprocess. A session backend does part of its work inside an interactive Claude Code session, which means the dispatcher cannot see or gate that step.

Both are mandatory declarations. There is no default in either direction.

The guardrail

A vault that holds confidential material declares confidential = true and carries a .confidential marker file. On such a vault the dispatcher refuses, without fallback:

• any backend with locality other than local
• any backend with invocation other than cli
• any backend that does not declare force_args

force_args is appended to every command on a confidential vault. It exists because a declared locality is a promise, not a fact: olw itself accepts --provider groq|openai|azure and reads three layers of configuration. Forcing the provider on the command line means no configuration layer can override it.

Available backends