Skip to content

Implicit Thesis (Na)

Element: Sodium (Na · 11) · alkali metal, foundational.

What it does

Implicit Thesis finds tight neighborhoods of notes that pull toward a single position. Two variants ship:

  • v0 (default, no LLM): returns the cluster — member notes, a centroid note, member quotes, a similarity score, and a folder-diversity gate.
  • v1 (--llm <provider> on the CLI, configured-LLM on Desktop and API): also calls the LLM to synthesize a one-sentence named thesis in the author’s voice. See What’s new in v1.1.0.

Not a cluster label. Not a tag. An actual thesis sentence in your voice.

Algorithm sketch

  1. Build a link graph over the indexed notes
  2. Apply hub-penalty smoothing (heavy hubs like daily-notes get down-weighted)
  3. Detect tight near-cliques (density ≥ 0.5)
  4. For each clique, pull representative quotes
  5. Synthesize a thesis sentence via the configured LLM (or skip with --no-llm)

Thresholds

SettingDefaultWhere to override
HUB_DENSITY_HARD1.5SPEC.md §9.2
HUB_DENSITY_SOFT0.5SPEC.md §9.2
Min clique size3--min-clique
Confidence floor0.55--confidence-floor

False positives

The most common failure mode is diary clusters: 12 daily notes all mentioning “the build” don’t constitute a thesis. The hub-penalty layer addresses this, but if your vault has unusually structured daily-notes the penalty may not fire. Add a project-root tag to the daily folder to make it visible.

Confidence

Confidence is computed via the falsification audit (see audit). A finding with confidence ≥ 0.65 is suitable for promotion; below 0.45, review by hand first.