What Liefwork Writes to Your Vault

A fair question to ask of anything that draws your files. The short answer: rendering a coral changes nothing, and everything else happens only when you ask.

Looking is read-only. Opening a coral, panning, zooming, changing display settings — none of it touches a file. Rendering never modifies an existing note.

Notes you create, Liefwork stamps. When you add a lief or a branch within a coral, Liefwork writes small frontmatter into that new note: created and order. That is what lets a branch keep its editorial sequence instead of drifting with modification times.

Renaming stays in step. Inside an open coral, renaming a branch renames its folder-note to match, and renaming the folder-note renames the branch. This keeps the pair from drifting apart; it applies only to corals you have open.

Seeding writes a scaffold, and only when you accept it. Seed as coral writes, concretely: Growth Charter.md — the coral's growth instructions, open markdown any AI agent can read — plus three short pointer files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md) that redirect each agent's own auto-load to the Charter, the root meristem note, and, if you typed a founding prompt, that prompt captured as the coral's first lief. The three pointer files are deliberately not rendered in the coral — they are configuration breadcrumbs, not memory — though they stay visible in Obsidian's file explorer like any file. If you leave the option on, seeding also installs a small logging hook that your agent — not Obsidian — runs: a readable script that reads only that folder and never touches the network. Either way it records a small provenance manifest listing exactly what was planted, which is how Undo seeding removes exactly that. The dialog lists all of this before writing anything. See Memory Corals.

Nothing leaves your vault. No telemetry, no analytics, no update checks. The only network call the plugin ever makes is licence activation, if you choose to buy Pro, and it is user-initiated from settings.

The formal version of all of this is in Privacy and Licensing.

Next: Limits & Large Vaults.