Hacker NewsWe got frustrated with the fragmented experience of exploring & creating across our file manager, the web and document apps. Lots of manual searching, opening windows & tabs, scrolling, and ultimately copying & pasting into a document editor.
Surf is a desktop app meant for simultaneous research and thinking to minimize the grunt work. It’s made of two parts:
1) A multi-media library where you can save and organize files and webpages into collections called Notebooks.
2) A LLM-powered smart document which you can auto-generate using the context from any stored page, tab or entire notebook. This document contains deep links back to the source material — like a page of a PDF or timestamp in a YouTube video. Unlike Deep Research products (or NotebookLMs chat) the entire thing is editable. The user also stays in the loop.
With a technology like AI, context / data is proving to be king. We think it should stay under the user’s control, with minimal lock in: where you can own & export, and plug & play with different models. That’s why Surf is:
- Open Source on GitHub - Open (& Local Data): the data saved in Surf is stored on your local machine in open and accessible formats and mostly works offline. - Open Model Choice: you can choose which models you use with Surf, and can add custom & Local LLMs
Early users include students & researchers who are learning and doing thematic research using Surf.
Github repo: https://github.com/deta/surf/
Website: https://deta.surf/
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