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

kkenforthewin 2 days ago 41 commentsRead Article on atomicapp.ai

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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.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 896 words in the discussion.

Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

zby•2 days 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go in the LangChain direction with VC funding designs that are not yet ready solidifying choices that would normally be superseded.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•2 days ago

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

kenforthewin•1 day ago

This is .. honestly a great synopsis of Atomic and its design tradeoffs. Thanks! Giving commonplace a look.

zby•1 day ago

Thanks!

The reviews are done automatically - here are the instructions: https://github.com/zby/commonplace/blob/main/kb/agent-memory...

I am open to changing these instructions - it cannot be about just making your system look better - but I'll try to incorporate genuine ideas how to improve these reviews.

davidcollantes•2 days ago

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

banditelol•2 days ago

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

max-privatevoid•2 days ago

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

embedding-shape•2 days 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•1 day ago

Atomic supports any generic openAI compatible LLM provider, including ollama, LM studio, etc.

embedding-shape•1 day ago

But local-first !== defaults to local inference, right?

kenforthewin•2 days 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?

max-privatevoid•1 day ago

Yes. Why even call it local-first when local isn't first? Not to mention, for some reason they decided to only support Ollama instead of giving you the option to connect to any OpenAI-compatible server, which would make this work with any other inference server such as llama.cpp and vLLM as well as Ollama. (and also most SaaS inference providers, including OpenRouter, so the custom integration would not be necessary either, https://schizo.cooking/schizo-takes/9.html)

kenforthewin•1 day ago

Did you think local-first meant how a dropdown is sorted?

OpenAI-compatible is indeed one of the provider options for Atomic. Ollama and openRouter are separate options to allow for easier selection of models from these specific providers.

Lalabadie•1 day ago

Yes, hah.

"Local-first, your data never leaves the computer! Except once to go to the biggest information hoarders on the Internet."

kenforthewin•1 day ago

Atomic supports any generic openAI compatible LLM provider, including ollama, LM studio, etc.

bryanhogan•2 days ago

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

kenforthewin•2 days 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•2 days ago

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

redrove•1 day ago

So an Obsidian plugin? Got it.

kenforthewin•1 day ago

One can imagine an obsidian plugin of any arbitrary level of complexity, given it's written in a Turing-complete language.

danielgall500•2 days ago

Awesome! How did you find using Tauri? Were there any particular pain points?

sdevonoes•2 days 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•2 days ago

but there are a lot of them

ariejan•2 days 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.

CrypticShift•2 days 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')

atomicnotlocal1•1 day ago

The app Atomic.app com.atomic.app (signer: Developer ID Application: Foldingspace Labs LLC (D3SX98L77N)) will not run without access to fonts.googleapis.com:53, fonts.gstatic.com:53, api.fontshare.com:53.

kenforthewin•1 day ago

nice username :)

fair point, the app makes requests to load fonts. we'll fix that next release.

Linell•2 days 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!

voidhorse•2 days 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•2 days ago

"Runs everywhere"

...except my Android phone LOL

kenforthewin•2 days ago

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

memjay•2 days 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.

kenforthewin•1 day ago

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I admit copywriting is not my forte. i'm a solo dev, I'm focusing most of the time and energy on the product itself. There are always 100 things I could be polishing for Atomic - social media presence, website, docs, etc. even with AI there just aren't enough hours in the day - you have to triage somehow.

supern0va•2 days 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.

Lalabadie•1 day ago

I don't mind the em-dash, but that whole front page is very much "We prompted ourselves a web site"

nathan_compton•2 days 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.