Show HN: Atomic – Local-first, AI-augmented personal knowledge base
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.
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
bryanhogan
Generally curious, how is this different from pointing Claude Cowork at an Obsidian Vault?
CrypticShift
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')
ariejan
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.
zby
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go in the LangChain direction with VC funding designs that are not yet ready solidifying choices that would normally be superseded.
Linell
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!
sdevonoes
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
anentropic
"Runs everywhere" ...except my Android phone LOL
voidhorse
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"
memjay
> 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.
nathan_compton
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.
max-privatevoid
I sure love when the local-first software defaults to a non-local option for its main feature.
danielgall500
Awesome! How did you find using Tauri? Were there any particular pain points?
atomicnotlocal1
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.