Show HN: Atomic – Local-first, AI-augmented personal knowledge base

kkenforthewin about 7 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on atomicapp.ai

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Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

zby•about 3 hours ago

Reviewed: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/agent-memory-systems/revie...

It is the second llm wiki on frontpage today!

I wish the scene was more collaborative - instead of everyone writing their own. But I guess this is the llm curse - too easy to start. I am afraid it will all go in the LangChain direction with VC funding designs that are not yet ready solidifying choices that would normally be superseded.

drunkan•about 2 hours ago

Lots of good ideas and divergent methods and sources here cheers for the link

davidcollantes•about 2 hours ago

What's the other one? I cannot find it.

banditelol•about 2 hours ago

Probably this one (Tolaria) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882697

max-privatevoid•about 1 hour ago

I sure love when the local-first software defaults to a non-local option for its main feature.

embedding-shape•35 minutes ago

Somehow, in the AI world, "local-first" means a local harness talking to a remote model, almost never "local harness talking to local model". But then "open source model" apparently also means "you can download the weights if you agree to our license" and almost never "you can see, understand and iterate on what we did", so the definitions already drifted a lot between the two ecosystems.

kenforthewin•27 minutes ago

I'm not sure what the dunk is supposed to be here .. Atomic supports the exact same feature set with local models as it does for OpenRouter. Is your gripe just that Openrouter is the first option in the dropdown?

kenforthewin•about 7 hours ago

Hey HN - I first posted about my knowledge base product, Atomic, here around a month ago; since then, a viral tweet by Karpathy has produced a torrent of AI powered knowledge base projects. meanwhile I've been shipping like crazy, here are some of the new features shipped in the last month:

- Rebuilt the iOS app with an Android app on the way

- expanded both the MCP and internal agent chat toolkit immensely

- A custom, CodeMirror6-based markdown editor with obsidian-style rendering

- A dashboard view that provides a daily summary of atoms created or updated in the last day

And many bug fixes and improvements across the board. Atomic is MIT licensed. You can download the desktop app, but the true power is unlocked by self hosting an atomic server, which any client (web, mobile, or desktop) can connect to from anywhere. You can add content to your knowledge base directly, or via RSS feed, web clipper, mobile share capture, obsidian sync, or REST api.

Linell•about 2 hours ago

I've been tinkering with my own version of this idea off and on for months, and it's great to see someone finally make the thing that I've been wanting since LLMs hit the scene. Congrats on everything you've shipped!

ariejan•about 3 hours ago

Killer feature: add audio transcription. Record that meeting; just tell the app what you want to remember. It gets transcribed and then processed like any other note.

bryanhogan•about 4 hours ago

Generally curious, how is this different from pointing Claude Cowork at an Obsidian Vault?

kenforthewin•about 4 hours ago

Biggest difference is Atomic leverages an LLM to auto-tag and a text embedding pipeline to drive semantic search - so the knowledge base is self-organizing. The bet here is that having an agent grep the filesystem is fine for a carefully curated, relatively small set of markdown files. It starts to degrade if you approach your knowledge base as a place to put everything: personal notes, articles you find interesting, entire textbooks if you want to. Having a vector database in this context is pretty much required past a certain scale; a filesystem-based approach is just an incredibly inefficient way to do retrieval in this context, and your agent is bound to miss important data points.

thomas_viaelo•about 1 hour ago

Does the LLM auto-tagging and embedding pipeline run on the device, or are they remote calls?

sdevonoes•about 2 hours ago

They keep adding this “cloud of dots” where each dot represents a concept or something you wrote, and they are linked to other dots… sure it’s pretty the first time you see it, but it’s not useful at all beyond that

baddash•about 2 hours ago

but there are a lot of them

CrypticShift•about 4 hours ago

I would love to be able to do the clustering from a CSV instead of a collection of Markdown files. I know I can easily generate the files, but I used to do this directly for very short text inputs (just titles or words) on nomic.ai (before they pivoted to 'Enterprise')

nathan_compton•about 1 hour ago

Maybe I'm just spoiled with a large working memory, but I don't want an AI agent thinking or remembering of synthesizing for me. Seems like a great way to never have a new idea.

memjay•about 1 hour ago

> Not x — but y.

Am I the only one who feels a bit betrayed after reading LLM text? I am not even willing to try out the app after I notice… which is a shame.

At least polishing the obvious parts would help a lot and is not that much work.

supern0va•about 1 hour ago

As someone that makes regular use of the em-dash, comments like this are rather maddening.

I still refuse to self-censor to avoid having my actual writing get flagged by someone as LLM written.

voidhorse•about 1 hour ago

I feel like most of these applications all boil down to "Obsidian but with AI integration baked in up front". It'd be interesting to see approaches that actually rethink commonplaces of the experience (graph view etc) rather than just reproduce the same thing but "with ai"

anentropic•about 2 hours ago

"Runs everywhere"

...except my Android phone LOL

kenforthewin•about 2 hours ago

working on it https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic/tree/main/mobile/andr...