Starcat For GitHub - Ask your GitHub Stars — local RAG on native macOS
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Starcat is a native, local-first macOS app that turns messy GitHub Stars into a searchable, AI-powered knowledge base. Organize repositories with tags, notes, status and smart filters; get AI summaries and tag suggestions, track releases, and rediscover useful projects fast. Unlike browser bookmarks or cloud-first Star managers, Starcat keeps your data on your Mac, supports your own AI keys, and lets AI suggest—not decide—so you always stay in control.
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Hi Product Hunt,
I'm dong4j. A year ago, I realized my GitHub Stars had become useless.
Not because GitHub is bad — but because starring is too easy. Click, and it's saved. After a few years I had 1,800+ starred repos and no way to find the one I actually needed. I once spent 20 minutes scrolling, trying to remember the name of a Swift clipboard manager I'd starred months earlier.
So I built Starcat: a native macOS app (SwiftUI, not Electron) that treats your GitHub Stars as a personal map of tools, libraries, and ideas worth remembering.
What it does today:
• Sync Stars into a native three-column workspace; cache & read READMEs offline
• Tags, notes, reading status, full-text (FTS5) + semantic search
• AI summaries, tag suggestions, translation, and in-repo chat (suggestions need your confirm)
• Release tracking, Trending/Weekly feeds, similar-repo recommendations
The part I'm most excited about — Knowledge Base RAG:
A dedicated workspace for natural-language questions across your knowledge base (repos you actively add to your library — not all stars).
Example: "which of my saved SwiftUI projects use Core Data?" That's not a keyword search; it needs semantic retrieval across READMEs, notes, and summaries, then a citation-backed answer.
Retrieval is local-first hybrid: FTS5 + local vector search (vDSP-accelerated, ~23x vs naive Swift), optional remote reranker. RAG is read-only — it never auto-writes tags or notes.
AI toolchain:
Local MCP Service + starcat-cli so Claude/Codex/other agents can query your stars and pull structured repo context. You bring your own AI provider (OpenAI-compatible, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Ollama, etc.). Data stays on your Mac by default.
Open source: https://github.com/starcat-app/Starcat
Would love feedback from anyone with a large Stars library, people doing open-source research, or folks building local RAG on macOS.
Website:
https://starcat.ink