Source

A source is anything worth keeping. Notes, past posts, saved articles, RSS or newsletter content, Notion or Obsidian exports, Readwise highlights, direct uploads, or a URL you pasted this morning. The library is general-purpose. You do not have to justify why something is there.

This is a deliberate stance. Older framing treated sources as “writing-influence inputs” only. In practice, most of what you read is not meant to shape your voice. It is reference, background, or a question you are chasing. Sadie treats all of that as first-class and lets you optionally signal influence when you want to.

Kinds

notes, docs, past_posts, saved_article, rss, newsletter, notion, obsidian, readwise, upload. The list is additive. Future integrations slot in without breaking existing sources.

Weighting is optional

Every source can carry a weighting:

• personal_library for something you are keeping for your own reference
• representative_of_me for material that genuinely speaks with your voice
• reference_material for background you want Sadie to know about, not speak like
• use_cautiously for material with noise, bias, or a voice you want kept at arm’s length

None of this is required. A source is useful without a weighting. The compilers use weighting, when present, to calibrate how much a source should shape your Soul versus provide reference context.

Weighting history is tracked in a separate table with optional notes, so you can adjust as your relationship with a source changes. Adding or weighting a user-chosen source also becomes a visible learning signal in Soul: representative sources teach voice, personal-library and reference-only choices teach taste, reference feed-item saves teach what you chose to keep as evidence, and cautious sources teach what Sadie should keep at arm’s length.

What Sadie does with a source

Adding a source kicks off two kinds of downstream work:

1. Wiki patches. The source body is scanned for concepts, people, themes, and questions already in your wiki, and for new ones. Matches produce candidate patches that cite the source. See Wiki.
2. Soul evidence. Representative-weighted sources feed your Voice Portrait. Reference material feeds the narrative layers without touching voice.

Studio-filed sources keep their origin visible. A standalone Studio document is labeled as a Studio draft; a draft that began from Today is labeled as a Today draft and keeps links back to the Studio document and Today card when those records still exist.

Status

Uploaded sources land as ready. Sources that pull from live integrations move through connecting, ready, error, or paused. You can pause any source at any time to stop it feeding the compilers.

For Notion syncs, retryable upstream issues such as rate limits or transient network failures are tracked in sync stats without marking the whole connection broken. Fatal issues such as invalid auth or missing selected pages surface as sync errors.

Imported Notion rows also inherit the provider sync state in Memory. If the workspace is disconnected, retrying, or needs attention, each Notion source shows that provider-level state before its own row-level freshness, so stale integrations are not hidden behind an old successful page import. When Notion returns retry-after timing for a retryable issue, Memory includes the active retry window in that freshness detail.

Saved feed items are frozen library sources, but they keep a provider reference to their origin feed item. Memory uses that reference to show the origin feed’s health, so a saved article or newsletter item can remain stable while still warning you that the live feed is stale, retrying, paused, or broken.

Where to see them

Sources live in Memory. See Sources surface for the library view.