NemoFold

• 

  Architecture

Inspiration

Folders are full of knowledge you can never quite use. Local tools preserve privacy but lack strong reasoning; cloud assistants reason well but want broad uploads and return claims without evidence. We wanted an agent that treats both problems as one design question: reasoning may travel, authority does not.

What it does

NemoFold is a private, persistent document agent — CLI, local web console, HTTP API, and MCP server — with a Nautilus theme: every surface is a themed room of the boat.

• Captain's Desk: say what you need in one plain sentence; a wizard prepares a voyage — a chain of job drafts with open questions. It plans only; nothing executes until you open and run it.
• Use-case library ("My use cases"): kept voyages become reusable, editable cases with per-case and per-link model choice and fallbacks. A privacy-critical case can carry a hard chain override — always local — shown with a red warning badge and an optional justification. The library grows through usage, not fine-tuning.
• Case Chronicle: person registry with pseudonymous export and local re-identification, per-person timelines, alibi corroboration that keeps self-report and outside confirmation on separate lines, contradiction synopsis with both exact wordings, and needle-in-a-corpus queries with quote obligation — demonstrated on a committed fictional case file.
• Document services: evidence answers with exact quotes and locations, deterministic bundles, snapshot deltas, section-wise merges that show conflicts instead of silently choosing, fact distillation, tabular export, delivery rules that file artifacts by your own rules, and graded send rights (draft-only / send-with-confirmation / send-when-ordered) with recipient classes.
• Governance: model authority and rights are inspectable per chain and per link; every file action is journaled, previewable, and reversible.

How we built it — and the proven Nemotron run

The local core is a hexagonal Python architecture: SQLite FTS index, anchored primitives (extract, deduplicate, merge, delta), 44 workflow contracts composed from them, one strict nemofold.job.v1 contract across web, CLI, API, and skill. At commit 6b13d12cdb269e8693053ed0d90d173b8a6c8123, the complete CI regression passed on 2026-10-13: 1,189 tests on Windows/Python 3.12; 1,187 passed and two skipped on each Linux/Python 3.11 and 3.12 job. The owner's personal GUI acceptance was completed on 2026-10-13 after eight rounds of live testing with real folders; a ready-to-run judge test build is linked under "Try it out" (https://github.com/ellmos-ai/NemoFold/releases/latest).

When reasoning adds value, a policy and privacy gate creates a hashed, path-free package: pseudonymized bounded chunks, artificial source IDs, questions, a response schema, an explicit Nemotron model, and a budget ceiling. On 2026-09-02 a real paid run through Nebius Token Factory (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) completed with status: executed and cloud_proof: true — 8,207 tokens, $0.0047 against a $1.00 ceiling. The complete secret-free receipt chain is committed at examples/proven-run/; judges can re-verify it offline, no account needed:

python -m nemofold verify-result examples/proven-run

Challenges we ran into

It took five attempts, and that is the design working. The first four fail-closed at near-zero cost: a wire-format 400 (Token Factory expects max_tokens), our local evidence verifier rejecting two misattributed quotes in an otherwise fluent Nemotron answer, an over-strict receipt rule of our own, and a provider usage echo with additive detail fields. Every rejection became a documented fix in the commit history — and the verifier overruling a frontier model on quote attribution is our core promise, evidence before inference, enforced live.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A real, committed, offline-re-verifiable cloud proof; an anonymizer roundtrip where pseudonyms cross the gate and names are restored only locally; a product where a calm "just do it" mode and a full-transparency audit mode are the same engine; and a fictional detective case that exercises timelines, alibis, and contradictions end to end.

What we learned

Fail-closed gates turn provider quirks into cheap, documented lessons instead of surprises. Strict JSON contracts are something Nemotron handles remarkably well out of the box — quote fidelity reached 7/7 after a single system-prompt hardening iteration.

What's next for NemoFold

Hosted demo, questionnaire/rater-race analytics at scale, and richer chain-building in the wizard — the library keeps growing with its user.

Built With

• css
• github-actions
• html
• javascript
• nebius-token-factory
• nvidia-nemotron
• pytest
• python
• sqlite-fts5