Nitpick: Cursor for Files makes approximately zero sense to me given what I see here.
Feedback:
Supporting an enterprise air gapped solution of this clearly has huge value. It really doesn't matter where the data is stored if the indexing / embedding is happening on your infrastructure.
Enterprises with compliance requirements are quite likely the types of clients looking for ways to save time searching through petabytes of data.
I think the phrase is apt, actually, but it's not perfect:
1. We have an embedded agent that can read, edit, organize, and take actions on your files. This means it can read almost any media type, which is why it's "cursor for files" even though "isn't _cursor_, cursor for files?". In other words, Cursor is "Poly for text" :)
2. We provide you with an "IDE", I.e. a file browser. However, unlike Cursor we actually built our engine rather than relying on an existing open source one like VS Code
Lastly, agree about the enterprise solution. All in due time for sure!
Part of the issue with the "slogan" is Cursor/XYZ jank IDE is already "for files".
"Cursor for data" seems slightly better in my opinion. You are clearly using "Cursor" as something to draw familiarity to, But I suspect the bulk of your future target market probably doesn't know what "Cursor" is.
This is really cool! I suck at organizing my filesystem and I've lost track of how many times I had to find _that ONE_ PDF which I KNOW I have but cannot find! This would have solved that many times over.
However, at least for my use-case, this is a very infrequent problem. So, a monthly subscription and the security risk wouldn't be worth it. Though I'm certain there are people who work with files all day and for them, this might be god-send!
Agree. One thing that we see our users doing more of is "NotebookLM style tasks" where they just drop in a bunch of files or ask the agent to download stuff and then start using the agent to do things. Summarize, create notes, answer questions, etc. We believe that an increasing amount of work with "files" will be stuff like this, and having a file system that can search all your files to do these things seemed useful enough for us to build!
My immediate hesitance with a tool like this (which sounds awesome) is that I don't actually trust tools like Claude Code unless I have them running in a git directory where I can see exactly what changed, and easily revert when needed.
Do y'all have a solution for this here? Some kind of safety layer of some kind to easily review and optionally revert actions the agent has taken across my entire file system?
The search part of this is cool, but if the write side is solved, shut up and take my money.
We're adding that feature to be able to manually approve agentic actions! You can already revert things, as our file system is fully version controlled.
Won’t this only work when connected to the internet? So I can’t use it on a flight.
Or if I work in finance, or healthcare, or law, or government, or a hardware design company, I don’t want my files leaving my network. Those are very important use cases, much more important than searching my personal laptop. I want this for WORK, not my little photo collection or notes or whatever.
This is a great use case for modern LLM/embedding models but gotta be local to be actually useful in the places where it’s most needed.
The file browsing is fully offline supported (as in the files get synced locally). We also allow text search offline, but smart search is not yet offline (we need to embed the search prompt), however, we would like to support fully offline use soon!
Hooking up the Internet to my filesystem is scary. What security measures are in place to ensure a compromise of your infrastructure doesn't compromise mine?
I'm not certain what exact scenario you are referring to. Do you mean if someone is able to install malware on our backend system will that malware get sent to you?
Is there something in particular that we are vulnerable to that doesn't also affect Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, etc.?
You are correct that, from a security standpoint, your software is no different than any other software I install on my computer, since desktop computers have no sandboxing. But from a privacy standpoint, it could be uniquely concerning.
With Google Drive, I choose which files to upload. It doesn't have broad access to everything on my computer.
Dropbox, iCloud, and OneDrive are just backup services, so in theory they could just back up your files as an encrypted blob and have no way to read them. Unfortunately, they don't encrypt them (which is partly why I don't use those services). But at least I have their "promise" that they won't read or analyze my files, which would make me feel better even if its a weak promise.
On the other hand, your service, by nature, is reading an analyzing all of my files using a remote server.
> We may build models that identify keywords and topics from a given document. These models may be trained on your documents and metadata, and power features within Dropbox such as improved search relevance, auto-sorting and organization features, and document summaries.
+1 for this - I don't trust proprietary software with access to my whole filesystem like this. Definitely not if a future update could change the pricing terms, introduce hidden telemetry or deprive me of the app on a whim.
This app gives me the same heebie-jeebies as the "Warp" terminal that was heavily pushed (and then rebuked) on HN. I don't want to replace my file browser or terminal with a subscription service, full-stop. The most magical featureset on the market won't move my needle, but then again maybe I'm not the ideal customer for this kind of product.
The landing makes focus on multimedia, but I am writing a non fiction book, and most of my sources are links, PDFs, docs with notes, etc. Would it work in that case as well? My ideal solution should be able to oganize my files and be able to ask questions about the contents.
Maybe I'm too old, but after I read the post I thought -- oh this is an "AI-first Quicksilver" -- who remembers that plugin for Mac? I don't think they stayed relevant enough
While it seems like a cool enough product conceptually, in practice there is absolutely zero chance I'm putting my files in your cloud to be garbelled up by AI and paying you for the privilege. Also, allowing an agent to download arbitrary files from the internet is extremely alarming. nope nope nope nope NOPE
Only way I would ever use something like this is with a local/self-host model that I run myself on my own hardware, with meticulous control over what the thing can access on the internet.
Can you say more about how Polyembed-v1 handles video files? Does it handle the audio or just the video? What do you do about videos longer than a couple of minutes?
It handles both video frames and audio-in-video. So if you wanted, you could search for something that was said in a video and it'll find you the exact segment of it!
We don't use transcription or any post processing. We simply embed the file. Our embedding has an additional inner dimension to support long duration content. So it's [N x D] where D is the embed dimension and N is an internal dimension that varies on the content.
Here's what we always tell founders about demo videos: "What works well for HN is raw and direct, with zero production values. Skip any introductions and jump straight into showing your product doing what it does best. Voiceover is good, but no logos or music!"
The video I provided was a raw, uncut, video. The editing is done by Screen Studio, which only does the "zoom" effect. But there's no studio magic there. I didn't speed anything up or cut out buggy bits or even do a retake!
Nitpick: Cursor for Files makes approximately zero sense to me given what I see here.
Feedback:
Supporting an enterprise air gapped solution of this clearly has huge value. It really doesn't matter where the data is stored if the indexing / embedding is happening on your infrastructure.
Enterprises with compliance requirements are quite likely the types of clients looking for ways to save time searching through petabytes of data.
I think the phrase is apt, actually, but it's not perfect:
1. We have an embedded agent that can read, edit, organize, and take actions on your files. This means it can read almost any media type, which is why it's "cursor for files" even though "isn't _cursor_, cursor for files?". In other words, Cursor is "Poly for text" :)
2. We provide you with an "IDE", I.e. a file browser. However, unlike Cursor we actually built our engine rather than relying on an existing open source one like VS Code
Lastly, agree about the enterprise solution. All in due time for sure!
Part of the issue with the "slogan" is Cursor/XYZ jank IDE is already "for files". "Cursor for data" seems slightly better in my opinion. You are clearly using "Cursor" as something to draw familiarity to, But I suspect the bulk of your future target market probably doesn't know what "Cursor" is.
This is really cool! I suck at organizing my filesystem and I've lost track of how many times I had to find _that ONE_ PDF which I KNOW I have but cannot find! This would have solved that many times over.
However, at least for my use-case, this is a very infrequent problem. So, a monthly subscription and the security risk wouldn't be worth it. Though I'm certain there are people who work with files all day and for them, this might be god-send!
Agree. One thing that we see our users doing more of is "NotebookLM style tasks" where they just drop in a bunch of files or ask the agent to download stuff and then start using the agent to do things. Summarize, create notes, answer questions, etc. We believe that an increasing amount of work with "files" will be stuff like this, and having a file system that can search all your files to do these things seemed useful enough for us to build!
My immediate hesitance with a tool like this (which sounds awesome) is that I don't actually trust tools like Claude Code unless I have them running in a git directory where I can see exactly what changed, and easily revert when needed.
Do y'all have a solution for this here? Some kind of safety layer of some kind to easily review and optionally revert actions the agent has taken across my entire file system?
The search part of this is cool, but if the write side is solved, shut up and take my money.
We're adding that feature to be able to manually approve agentic actions! You can already revert things, as our file system is fully version controlled.
Very interested in the idea of an AI being able to interact with my filesystem.
we experimented with something like this: https://local-note-taker.vercel.app/chat
repo in case you'd rather run it locally: https://github.com/tambo-ai/local-note-taker
Curious to compare how our two ideas are built differently, feel free to reach out (email in my profile)
Won’t this only work when connected to the internet? So I can’t use it on a flight.
Or if I work in finance, or healthcare, or law, or government, or a hardware design company, I don’t want my files leaving my network. Those are very important use cases, much more important than searching my personal laptop. I want this for WORK, not my little photo collection or notes or whatever.
This is a great use case for modern LLM/embedding models but gotta be local to be actually useful in the places where it’s most needed.
The file browsing is fully offline supported (as in the files get synced locally). We also allow text search offline, but smart search is not yet offline (we need to embed the search prompt), however, we would like to support fully offline use soon!
Hooking up the Internet to my filesystem is scary. What security measures are in place to ensure a compromise of your infrastructure doesn't compromise mine?
I'm not certain what exact scenario you are referring to. Do you mean if someone is able to install malware on our backend system will that malware get sent to you?
Is there something in particular that we are vulnerable to that doesn't also affect Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, etc.?
You are correct that, from a security standpoint, your software is no different than any other software I install on my computer, since desktop computers have no sandboxing. But from a privacy standpoint, it could be uniquely concerning.
With Google Drive, I choose which files to upload. It doesn't have broad access to everything on my computer.
Dropbox, iCloud, and OneDrive are just backup services, so in theory they could just back up your files as an encrypted blob and have no way to read them. Unfortunately, they don't encrypt them (which is partly why I don't use those services). But at least I have their "promise" that they won't read or analyze my files, which would make me feel better even if its a weak promise.
On the other hand, your service, by nature, is reading an analyzing all of my files using a remote server.
You choose which files to use in Poly, we don't scan your hard drive either.
I don't know about the other services, but Dropbox _does_ read your files. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq
> We may build models that identify keywords and topics from a given document. These models may be trained on your documents and metadata, and power features within Dropbox such as improved search relevance, auto-sorting and organization features, and document summaries.
+1 for this - I don't trust proprietary software with access to my whole filesystem like this. Definitely not if a future update could change the pricing terms, introduce hidden telemetry or deprive me of the app on a whim.
This app gives me the same heebie-jeebies as the "Warp" terminal that was heavily pushed (and then rebuked) on HN. I don't want to replace my file browser or terminal with a subscription service, full-stop. The most magical featureset on the market won't move my needle, but then again maybe I'm not the ideal customer for this kind of product.
The landing makes focus on multimedia, but I am writing a non fiction book, and most of my sources are links, PDFs, docs with notes, etc. Would it work in that case as well? My ideal solution should be able to oganize my files and be able to ask questions about the contents.
Yes it does! We support web links, PDFs, documents (with annotations!).
Greplin was just too early.
When I read “Cursor for Files” my mind went to “app for reading and diffing content (i.e markdown) which I was very excited about.
Haha, we might need to actually build this feature!
Cool idea.
Maybe I'm too old, but after I read the post I thought -- oh this is an "AI-first Quicksilver" -- who remembers that plugin for Mac? I don't think they stayed relevant enough
I remember Quicksilver! That's not what we do though. You're thinking of stuff like Alfred, Spotlight, Raycast, etc.
While it seems like a cool enough product conceptually, in practice there is absolutely zero chance I'm putting my files in your cloud to be garbelled up by AI and paying you for the privilege. Also, allowing an agent to download arbitrary files from the internet is extremely alarming. nope nope nope nope NOPE
Only way I would ever use something like this is with a local/self-host model that I run myself on my own hardware, with meticulous control over what the thing can access on the internet.
Great user name for sure!
Can you say more about how Polyembed-v1 handles video files? Does it handle the audio or just the video? What do you do about videos longer than a couple of minutes?
It handles both video frames and audio-in-video. So if you wanted, you could search for something that was said in a video and it'll find you the exact segment of it!
We don't use transcription or any post processing. We simply embed the file. Our embedding has an additional inner dimension to support long duration content. So it's [N x D] where D is the embed dimension and N is an internal dimension that varies on the content.
I'd rather see a demo instead of a highly edited video with split second shots of the product.
Isn't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0 (linked above) that?
Here's what we always tell founders about demo videos: "What works well for HN is raw and direct, with zero production values. Skip any introductions and jump straight into showing your product doing what it does best. Voiceover is good, but no logos or music!"
My bad, totally missed the link in the text post. I clicked on 'watch video' on the Poly website
The video I provided was a raw, uncut, video. The editing is done by Screen Studio, which only does the "zoom" effect. But there's no studio magic there. I didn't speed anything up or cut out buggy bits or even do a retake!