WHAT IS IT?
notabene is a documentation collaboration tool that combines a static site generator with anchored comments placed directly on the rendered page. You select a passage, leave a note, then your AI agent (Claude Code first and foremost, via the bundled plugin) reads the .notabene/ directory, applies the edits to the source docs, resolves the discussion threads and journals every change. No SaaS, no database: everything is stored as JSON in your git repository.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING?
- The comment is the instruction: anchored to the exact passage, it is located and unambiguous. No need to quote the text or write a separate prompt, the agent knows precisely what to change and where.
- File-I/O protocol: the agent reads and writes files, nothing else. No server to run, no MCP to configure. A Claude Code plugin with a built-in skill ships with the tool, but any agent that can manipulate files will do.
- Auditable review loop: a two-phase mode lets humans validate diffs before they are applied, and every intervention produces a journal entry documenting what changed and why. The full history is browsable at
/journal. - Full-featured generator: MDX and CommonMark/GFM, multi-language documentation with per-language comments, full-text search via Pagefind, Mermaid diagrams with an interactive lightbox, PDF export with bookmarks and clickable TOCs.
- Git-native and self-hosted: comments, resolutions and the journal are versioned alongside the code. The read-only static build publishes to GitHub Pages with the included workflow.
USE CASES
- Continuous docs improvement loop: annotate on the rendered page, let the agent fix the sources
- Open source project documentation with a complete audit trail of changes
- Multilingual docs with feedback and fixes localized per language
- Distributed team review: everyone comments, one agent centralizes the edits
- GitHub Pages publishing with PDF export for client deliverables