AI authorship tracking in my vault

Up: ยง My note taking system

As AI usage for note creation has ramped up, notes created by Claude via MCP are increasingly interlinked with human-written notes. Without metadata to tell them apart, provenance becomes unclear over time. This system adds automatic authorship tracking so the vault maintains clarity about where notes come from.

The ai_authorship property

A wikilink property using the vault's existing category pattern โ€” each authorship type links to a hub note in categories/ and becomes browsable via Bases queries.

Values

  • [[AI Generated]] โ€” AI created the note entirely. This is the default for all notes created via MCP's create_note tool.
  • [[AI Co-authored]] โ€” Collaborative work where a human prompted and AI drafted. Default for posts created via MCP's new_post tool, since posts are typically my ideas published with Claude's help.
  • [[AI Edited]] โ€” A human-written note that was later modified by AI. Automatically set when MCP's update_note is called on a note that doesn't already have an AI authorship value.
  • Absent โ€” Human-written. No property needed; absence is the default.

Key behaviors

  • No downgrading: If a note is already marked [[AI Generated]] or [[AI Co-authored]], editing it via MCP won't change the authorship to [[AI Edited]] โ€” the original declaration of AI involvement is preserved.
  • Audit trail: Every MCP edit sets an ai_edited_at timestamp, regardless of current authorship status.
  • Explicit override: The ai_authorship parameter can be passed explicitly to create_note or new_post to override the default.

Why not track imports?

Readwise and Raindrop notes already have distinctive properties (readwise_book_id, raindrop_id). No need for an ai_authorship value โ€” filter on those existing IDs instead.

Category notes

The AI Authorship parent category groups three child categories:

Each has a Bases view that filters notes by their ai_authorship value.

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