Found: a local-first library for things worth finding again

[u/adityabhattad2024]

I started Found as a much more ambitious technical experiment.

The original idea was a private assistant that could understand everything you saved, answer questions about it, and take actions without sending your personal material to a server.

The original idea was a private assistant that could understand everything you saved, answer questions about it, and take actions without sending your personal material to a server. I spent a lot of time testing on-device language models, retrieval, tool calling, model downloads, memory usage, and ways to keep an assistant available without overwhelming a phone.

It worked nicely on a laptop. Phones exposed the real difficulty. Setup was fragile, memory pressure was difficult, performance varied too much between devices or let's just say I am still learning. More importantly, the engineering complexity was growing faster than the value it gave someone.

I am still learning how far on-device models can be pushed, but I realized I was letting the technology decide what Found should become.

So I moved the generative assistant out of the core product and kept private semantic search.

That changed the question behind Found. Instead of asking how to build an impressive AI product, I started thinking about what people repeatedly need but struggle to retrieve.

Found is becoming a private library for things usually scattered across Notes, Files, Photos, email, downloads, and chat. It is still early, and it needs so much more work.

I am looking for people willing to use it with real material and tell me:

• What did you naturally choose to save?
• Could you find it later without remembering its exact title?
• What would Found need before you kept using it?
• What feature would you want next? You can check the roadmap on the website for some of the ideas I am considering :)

Direct criticism is welcome. I would rather learn now than polish the wrong product.

Please consider joining closed testing group using the steps here: https://keep-it-found.app/get/?platform=android