Saw it on Twitter and was interested. But from the video and demos I immediately did not understand why Notebooks and Notes are two tabs? In my mind, a Note is IN a Notebook, not some separate adjacent item...
Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
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Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#12Looks to my like an effort to pivot from an AI embedded Browser after the ChatGPT Atlas release into a local system Browser.
I still don't see the advantage I get for my local system? Nearly all of the actions on the demo page are doable with chatGpt in one or three interactions.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#13Saw it on Twitter and was interested. But from the video and demos I immediately did not understand why Notebooks and Notes are two tabs? In my mind, a Note is IN a Notebook, not some separate adjacent item...
Yes agree, the Notebook / homepage UX still needs work.
We recently introduced a sidebar (after the video was made) which has them organized as you mention.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#14Photos are not mentioned as subset of media. I wonder if there’s a use case applicable to picture metadata.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#15So it's basically Cortana for Windows in a brand new powerful AI LLM avatar? ;-)
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#16Photos are not mentioned as subset of media. I wonder if there’s a use case applicable to picture metadata.
Yes great point. Photos are intended as a very important subset of media.
Not (yet) super usable, but for photos we have local OCR running, with Surf creating additional metadata (e.g. the link from where the photo was downloaded).
Can imagine some use cases -- off the top of my head, suggesting the right photos to embed in a note in response to a user query.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#17Is this an open source equivalent to google’s NotebookLM? I can tell. How does it stack up features wise?
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#18Looks to my like an effort to pivot from an AI embedded Browser after the ChatGPT Atlas release into a local system Browser. I still don't see the advantage I get for my local system? Nearly all of the actions on the demo page are doable with chatGpt in one or three interactions.
The big difference UX wise between chatbots and Surf is that Surf is built entirely on editable documents that you can mold / craft into an output (vs chat).
We actually had a chatbot, but our explorations showed that notes were a more effective in many cases!
An example of local data is that "Applets" made in Surf can be opened / updated from your local code editor, they're just HTML files.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#19Looks to my like an effort to pivot from an AI embedded Browser after the ChatGPT Atlas release into a local system Browser. I still don't see the advantage I get for my local system? Nearly all of the actions on the demo page are doable with chatGpt in one or three interactions.
Umm -- not being tied to ChatGPT? Like, that's huge. I personally do not consider consistently using any AI tool unless it has a local option. I've been air-quotes "paranoid" about things like this my whole life and it's served me QUITE well.
Re: Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook
#20Kudos on the launch. Love the local-ai approach.
Regarding open models: what is the go-to way for me to make Surf run with qwen3-vl? Ollama?
As far as I understand any endpoint that supports the completions API will work?
https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/AI_MODELS.md
If I attach image context will it be provided to qwen3-vl? Or does this only work with the "main" models like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and so on?