Subnotes for Claude Code
A plugin that turns Claude Code into an assistant working from your notes. It checks your notebooks against your goals, tells you what’s due, does the work it can, and remembers what you’ve told it.
What it does
- Starts from your goals. Write your goals in the Goals notebook. Claude checks whether each one has a plan that can get there, and whether that plan is working.
- Reviews your notebooks. Once a day it looks at what changed and raises what’s worth talking about, then adds a next step once you agree.
- Does the work. It takes your Today and Next tasks, does the ones it can (code, drafts, research), and lines up the ones that need you.
- Reads your journal. What you write in the Journal notebook becomes context, so you only say it once.
- Learns from you. When you correct it or wave a point off, it remembers why, and the next run is better.
- Still captures. Say “put that on the backlog” and it goes into the right notebook.
What you'd actually say
/subnotes:run
“A review is due: Kitchen Remodel changed since yesterday — starting it.” Then it talks through what it found, one point at a time.
“What should I work on next?”
Sorts your Today and Next tasks into what it can do now, what needs your input, and what only you can do — and starts on the first.
“We should handle the empty state too — put that on the backlog.”
Captured mid-conversation, without stopping to open an app.
Two rules it keeps
- It never deletes, and changes nothing without your yes. It adds tasks and notes on its own. To mark a task done, reschedule it or reword a line, it asks first, showing the old line and the new one, one line at a time. Nothing can be deleted, reordered or renamed.
- Only notebooks you connect are visible. Everything else is never written out at all, so it can't be read — invisible, not merely hidden.
What you'll need
Subnotes 1.7 or later, on a Mac, and Claude Code.
Installing it
In Claude Code, add the marketplace and install the plugin:
/plugin marketplace add rafrafgit/subnotes-plugin
/plugin install subnotes@SubnotesThen give Claude Code Full Disk Access in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, and restart it. macOS keeps one app’s files out of reach of another, so without it the plugin can see that the Subnotes folder exists but can’t open anything in it, and every command fails with a permission error.
Grant it to whichever app is actually running Claude Code — your terminal (Terminal, iTerm, Ghostty…), or the Claude desktop app. The grant doesn’t carry between apps, so running from a terminal you haven’t granted looks exactly like a plugin that stopped working on its own.
After that, just say it in any conversation — no command needed. Or run
/subnotes:run to start whatever is due — a review of your
notebooks against your goals, or your next tasks — and
/subnotes:help to see what's connected.
Connecting your notebooks
Nothing is visible to Claude until you say so. Open Settings in Subnotes (⌘,) and turn on the notebooks you want Claude to see — or right-click a single notebook and choose Connect to Claude Code.
Nothing leaves your Mac. The plugin reads files Subnotes writes inside its own app container, and writes tasks back the same way — there is no account, no server and no network call.