Output & Frontmatter
Everything SANE writes lives in the YAML frontmatter at the top of your note, prefixed with sane_. Your note body is never modified.
Overview
SANE uses the sane_ prefix as a namespace for all generated fields. This makes it trivial to distinguish AI-generated metadata from your own frontmatter, and to remove it all at once if needed.
Each field can be independently enabled or disabled via feature toggles in Settings. SANE will never overwrite your original frontmatter keys.
All fields
3 to 7 topic tags, written in lowercase with hyphens. Generated by the LLM based on the note's content and the most semantically related notes in your vault.
Tags are designed to be stable across re-processing — the same note should produce similar tags each time.
sane_tags: ["machine-learning", "neural-networks", "deep-learning"]
3 to 8 key phrases extracted from the note's content. More specific than tags — keywords capture the concrete concepts, terms, and ideas in the note rather than broad topic labels.
sane_keywords: ["backpropagation", "gradient descent", "activation function"]
Wiki-style links to the most relevant notes in your vault, as determined by semantic similarity (cosine distance between embeddings). The number of links is controlled by the relevantNotesCount setting (default 3).
Links use note titles, not file paths. Obsidian resolves them automatically.
sane_links: ["Introduction to AI", "Neural Net Basics", "Gradient Descent Explained"]
A 1–2 sentence summary of the note, capped at roughly 50 words. Written to be neutral and descriptive — useful for search, graph views, and quick skimming.
sane_summary: "An introduction to neural networks covering architecture, training via backpropagation, and common activation functions."
The version of SANE that last processed this note. Used internally to detect when a note was processed with an older version and may benefit from re-processing.
sane_version: "1.0.3"
Timestamp of the first time SANE processed this note. Written once and never updated. Useful for tracking when a note entered the SANE-managed set.
sane_created_at: "2025/5/5 19:59:11"
Timestamp updated each time SANE reprocesses the note. Reflects when the AI-generated metadata was last refreshed, not when you last edited the note body.
sane_modified_at: "2025/6/29 12:15:12"
Full example
A note with all fields enabled. The top block is original user frontmatter; the bottom block is everything SANE adds.
--- # your original frontmatter title: "On Neural Networks" created: "2025-05-01" # added by SANE sane_tags: ["machine-learning", "neural-networks", "deep-learning"] sane_keywords: ["backpropagation", "gradient descent", "activation function"] sane_links: ["Introduction to AI", "Neural Net Basics", "Gradient Descent Explained"] sane_summary: "An introduction to neural networks covering architecture, training, and common activation functions." sane_version: "1.0.3" sane_created_at: "2025/5/5 19:59:11" sane_modified_at: "2025/6/29 12:15:12" --- Your note body here. SANE never touches this.
Reverting changes
Because every generated field starts with sane_, reverting is unambiguous. SANE will never touch a field that doesn't carry the prefix.