TierNote is a Note Agent, not a coding agent or a general-purpose shell harness. Its job is to make a user's notes useful, searchable, and cheap to maintain.
- Manage notes, not a codebase. The agent reads the local Markdown library, links related notes, captures source material, and writes only through domain-specific note tools.
- Stay local by default. The library is plain Markdown on the user's machine. Provider credentials remain in the app-data configuration file and are never copied into the repository or library.
- Spend tokens where they matter. Completion comes first. The agent keeps answers concise, retrieves only relevant excerpts, reuses stable prompt prefixes, and blocks duplicate calls without putting task quality behind a user-selectable economy switch.
| Coding agent | TierNote Note Agent |
|---|---|
| edits source files and runs commands | curates Markdown notes and plans |
| optimizes for implementation speed | optimizes for clarity, recall, and cost |
| broad repository context | selected local notes and Library Graph context |
| model choice is usually secondary | cheap DeepSeek-compatible models are a first-class path |
The safe capability surface is intentionally narrow: search and read local notes, save or update notes, update personal plan pages, and adjust the T1-T5 priority map. There is no arbitrary shell tool.
Cost controls are always on and are not a separate quality mode. The Agent keeps the current task running until it reaches a genuine completion, user cancellation, provider failure, or the global emergency safety ceiling. Within that path it uses targeted local retrieval, stable system-prompt prefixes for cache reuse, duplicate-call detection, stale tool-result maintenance, and request-level context compaction. Provider cache-hit and token totals remain visible in the conversation metrics line.