Cite Engine

Drift-proof, closed-corpus citations for Obsidian. You can only cite passages that exist in your own clipped sources — fabrication is impossible by construction, and citations resolve to a passage, not to copied text, so they don't drift on edit or rename.

This is the AI-free v0 primitive from ../cite-engine-mvp-spec.md. AI synthesis is a later paid layer that sits on top of this substrate, so it can only emit citekeys that already resolve.

Three commands

1. Stamp source — run on a clipped note. Adds a stable citekey to frontmatter (from author/year/title) and a ^block-id to every passage. Idempotent.
2. Cite a passage — fuzzy-pick a passage from the registry of stamped sources and insert a live block-ref citation [[citekey#^blk|p. NN]]. There is no free-text path, so you cannot cite something that doesn't exist.
3. Integrity check — scan the active note; flags any citation that no longer resolves, and any quoted text that has drifted from its source block.

Data model

A source note carries citekey in frontmatter and ^block-ids on its passages. A citation is a native block ref plus a page locator — it renders live, so it can't drift. Resolution is by citekey (content-derived, stable), independent of filename, so renames don't break anything.

Install (manual, for testing)

Copy main.js, manifest.json, versions.json into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/cite-engine/, then enable in Settings → Community plugins.

Develop

npm install
npm run build      # bundle -> main.js
npm test           # core logic: G1 no-fabrication, G2 drift-proof
npx tsc --noEmit   # typecheck

The citation logic lives in src/core.ts with no Obsidian imports, so it's unit tested headless. src/main.ts is the thin Obsidian wrapper.