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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

#31

Post by pietz »

It has been wild watching deta over the years.

They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice.

I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned.

Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled.

Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Since I'm fairly happy with my Obsidian + Codex setup, I'll pass for now. The good news is, this one's open source!

I'd love to know how they're financing all of this. They have been around for years and users never even had the option to drop money in their lap. Now they're trying open source. Wild ride.

All the best!

PS: I would have paid for deta cloud Pro ;)

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

#32

Post by mxek »

pietz wrote: post #31

It has been wild watching deta over the years. They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice. I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned. Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled. Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Sin…

Thanks for this.

You forgot about the Deta Studio and the Horizon desktop app ;)

But on your question -- we're backed by supportive investors, and try to be frugal (we've had our fair share of sardines & rice).

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

#33

Post by chrisweekly »

pietz wrote: post #31

It has been wild watching deta over the years. They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice. I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned. Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled. Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Sin…

hey Pietz, have you written up your obsidian + codex setup? I'm a die-hard obsidian user, didn't like codex 6mo ago but heard it's gotten much better, so I'm very interested if you're willing to share TIA!

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

#35

Post by abdelhai »

mxek wrote: post #32
pietz wrote: post #31

It has been wild watching deta over the years. They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice. I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned. Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled. Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Sin…

Thanks for this. You forgot about the Deta Studio and the Horizon desktop app ;) But on your question -- we're backed by supportive investors, and try to be frugal (we've had our fair share of sardines & rice).

this tells me nothing; a good Portuguese can goes for upwards of $20

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

#37

Post by mxek »

mentalgear wrote: post #36

This seems to be a good open alternative to Atlas and Comet. I like the split-screen and local model usage!

Thanks!

One big distinction: we aren't trying to automate people's browsing / clicking, but augment people's thinking.

This creates a different feature set / model: tabs feeding into a document vs a chat going off and automating activity in tabs.

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

#38

Post by mhuffman »

pietz wrote: post #31

It has been wild watching deta over the years. They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice. I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned. Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled. Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Sin…

In either case, I am just happy that Knuth's idea of Literate programming is becoming more and more of a common reality after so many years.

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

#39

Post by codebastard »

jrm4 wrote: post #19
codebastard wrote: post #12

Looks 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.

You are welcome to replace ChatGPT in my question with any selfhostable AI Chat setup or CLI Tool.

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

#40

Post by pietz »

chrisweekly wrote: post #33
pietz wrote: post #31

It has been wild watching deta over the years. They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice. I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned. Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled. Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Sin…

hey Pietz, have you written up your obsidian + codex setup? I'm a die-hard obsidian user, didn't like codex 6mo ago but heard it's gotten much better, so I'm very interested if you're willing to share TIA!

Oh, it's nothing fancy I'm afraid.

I have an AGENTS.md file in my vault that provides a bit of context that this is not about coding, but about serving as my Obsidian helper. I ask it to check the .obsidian folder to check my plugins, Tell it how I like to build my presentations and the workflow I follow when writing articles.

Then I just launch codex in the terminal inside the vault, have it do stuff, while I watch the desktop app for change.

Other coding agents like Claude Code should work also, but gpt-5-codex was specifically trained on using the terminal to do everything it and doesn't even have that big of a system prompt related to coding. Works well.

Combine that with a speech-to-text app and codex blazes through to find stuff or do things for me.

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