We shipped local document search, and made citations non-negotiable

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Just shipped Knowledge Base in Osaurus. You hand your agents a folder of reference material, itineraries, specs, spreadsheets, whatever you keep, and they search across all of it and answer from it. It runs on your Mac.

The decision we kept coming back to: search alone wasn't enough. An agent that reads your files and gives a confident answer is still a black box unless it shows its work. So every answer cites the exact source it pulled from. You can see where it came from and check it.

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Citations non-negotiable is the right call — it's most of what makes a local agent trustworthy enough to point at your own files.

The part I've found genuinely hard: a citation proves where the text came from, not that the answer follows from it. An agent can cite a real page and still misread it, and that failure is harder to catch than an obviously wrong answer, because the citation is doing the reassuring.

I build grounded itineraries (amused to see itineraries in your examples), and what actually moved the needle for us wasn't showing the source — it was an automated check that the claim and the source agree, run on every change. Showing the work makes it checkable; something still has to do the checking.

Good ship.

This is exactly the direction we’re pursuing with Docushell’s : local document intelligence where answers don’t just retrieve context - they show the precise evidence behind each claim. The important distinction is making citations verifiable, with stable source fingerprints and locators, rather than relying only on the model to mention a filename. Love seeing source transparency become a first-class product feature.