Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook

Hi HN!

We 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/

Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
github.com

Interesting! I'm very intrigued by the possibility of new forms of computer interaction made by breaking down app silos and linking data across various mediums. Something that caught my eye recently is Atuin Desktop, which seems to be a jupyter notebook style thing that runs your code natively.

The benefits of this is that I can connect this data, but in a computable medium. Does your product have any similar ability to bring code workflows "inside" the Surf application?

Atuin: https://github.com/atuinsh/desktop

Looks like a personal Notion, or Obsidian.

I would call this a note-taking app rather than a notebook, which to many mean computational notebooks like Jupyter.

Many ideas are inspired by Space, but totally different codebase.

big thanks for the praise!

for all the screen recordings we use Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak. Really a all in one workhorse for everything screen recording related.

The main teaser video was made by our incredible video editor Célestin (https://www.celest.in/) who is working with After Effects, Premiere and Blender.