On a Mac with Jotaid Pro, AI agents running on the same Mac can connect to Jotaid over MCP (Model Context Protocol), the standard many agents use to reach outside tools. They read your notes and the concept network Jotaid builds from them, so you can ask an agent what your notes add up to.
At a Glance
- Read-only — agents can read; they cannot create, edit or delete anything
- Off by default — nothing listens until you turn it on, and it runs only while Jotaid is open
- Only on your own Mac — it listens on
127.0.0.1, so nothing on your network or the internet can reach it - Mac only, with Pro — there is no MCP server on iPhone
What an Agent Can Do
- Browse your projects, notes and tags
- Search your notes by meaning, or for an exact word
- Read a note in full, including its
[[links]]and where it sits among your projects and themes - Look up a concept by name, even an old name you have since renamed, and see which notes mention it and how it relates to other concepts
- See the whole network — which concepts keep appearing together and how they group
- See a concept over time — when it first appeared, grew and went quiet
That is what makes "what do my notes add up to?" answerable: the agent reads the same concept network you see in Jotaid's graph, co-occurrence matrix and Trends, and puts it into words.
You Decide What It Can Read
- Readable projects — agents see only the projects you tick; a request for any other project is refused
- An access token — kept in your Mac's Keychain; regenerating it disconnects anything still using the old one
- Last used — shows when an agent last read from the server
Jotaid uploads nothing. What happens to the text an agent reads is up to that agent and its provider, the same as anything else you share with it.
Connect an Agent
In Jotaid on the Mac, open Settings → Agent, switch on Let agents read your notes, then use Copy setup and paste the configuration into your agent's MCP settings. Any agent that supports MCP servers over HTTP with a custom header can connect. Step-by-step instructions are in the guide: Connect AI Agents (MCP).
What It Does Not Do
- Agents cannot write: no new notes, no edits, no deletions
- It cannot be reached from another device, and there is no hosted version — Jotaid has no public HTTP API
- There is no chat inside Jotaid that answers across your whole library; the answering is done by the agent you connect
More answers are in the FAQ, and what Pro includes is on Free vs Pro.