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Software

Found It!

I can find a file on my Mac by describing it instead of remembering the filename.

Why it exists

Spotlight only searches words that are actually in the filename, and the filename is usually something like Scan_2026_03_11_final(2).pdf. What I remember is that it was the invoice from March.

How it works
Index
FSEvents writes an instant SQLite record, so the file shows up right away
Enrich
Background pass. OCR, metadata extraction, local vector embedding
Query
Parsed to structured JSON, matched on keyword score plus embedding distance
Scope
Desktop, Documents, Downloads
Privacy
Files never leave the machine
The first pass makes a file findable in milliseconds. The second one makes it findable by meaning.
What broke

The two passes fought each other. A file would get its instant record, then the background pass would finish and overwrite the row while the search index still pointed at the old one, so a file you had just seen would vanish from results. The fix was making phase two update in place instead of replacing the record.

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