Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: Socrates
Most people who study alone know the Feynman technique. You pick a concept, explain it in plain words as if to a beginner, and wherever you stall, you go back and fill the hole. It works. It also has a door you have to be through already: you have to be able to start talking.
Halfway through a thick technical handbook, that door is still shut. The last chapter is not standing up in your head yet. You do not even know which piece to “teach.” A blank page will not ask you the first question.
The Socratic method is the other half of that picture. Socrates barely lectured. He sat next to the other person and asked about the sentence they had just read, until they saw the crack themselves. The answer is not delivered. It is asked out of you.
That is the one job this plugin has.
Generic chatbots do not sit there. They have not read this book. You paste a paragraph; they return a smooth explanation that is correct and unrelated to the decision two chapters back that this sentence depends on.
Socrates is an Obsidian sidebar that stays on the passage you highlighted. You highlight, click Use selection, and pick a chip or type a question. The default chip is Don’t tell me yet — ask me something. A tool whose default is “hand you the answer” costs you one act of thinking every time you use it. A default of “ask you a question” has a different cost.
If it wants to change the note, you get Allow / Reject. Nothing hits disk until you allow it. In the background it also reads elsewhere in the same book and queues deeper questions, at most one per turn.
Not a writing assistant, not a brainstorm box, not a second ChatGPT tab. Desktop only: Obsidian 1.5.0+ and Python 3.11+ on the same machine (it starts a local sidecar). Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works; I have only dogfooded DeepSeek. The API key lives in ~/.socrates-pen/llm.json on your machine, not inside the vault, so Sync / git cannot carry it away.
Main conversation works on any Markdown note. The background deep-dive is stronger if the handbook has a stable section structure (the README has a template).
Install: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → Socrates
English README, with transcripts you can rerun: socrates-pen/README.en.md at main · xesws/socrates-pen · GitHub
Repo: GitHub - xesws/socrates-pen · GitHub
Happy to take questions. If you try it on a real handbook and it asks something dumb, I want to hear that too.