Hey everyone, I'm launching Dotient on Product Hunt this week and wanted to share what I've been building before the big day.
Dotient is a desktop app that lets you search your files by what they look like, not what you happened to name them two years ago. Everything runs completely offline, nothing leaves your machine. It also has a live graph view of your files, deep PDF search, and canvas workspaces for organizing everything.
I built it solo out of pure frustration with Windows File Explorer and the lack of any tool that actually understands your files without making you do all the work manually.
Would love to hear any questions or feedback before launch. Happy to talk through anything.
Pinning one well-tuned model is a totally fair call for v1. The one cheap thing I'd still bake in now: stamp every vector row in SQLite with a model id or hash. It costs almost nothing today, and it's what lets you re-embed lazily if you ever do swap models, where a file gets re-embedded the first time it's queried after the upgrade so the cost spreads across normal use instead of one multi-hour background rescan. Retrofitting that stamp after the fact is the part that hurts.
Dotient
@dipankar_sarkar Noted!
local-first for AI is the right call. cloud semantic search means a third party sees what you searched for and what you stored. with files it gets worse. embeddings themselves leak content. you can reverse a vector back to something pretty close to the original text or image now.
real question for v2: when you ship cross-device sync, does the index stay local-per-device or sync encrypted? that's the moment most local-first products quietly become cloud products.
Looks like something out of a sci-fi. I think this clicks better with how my brain is wired than anything I use currently. The demo video was a bit fast and jarring for me though. I think the UI itself is impressive enough without needing that twisting animation. Thanks for sharing!
Dotient
@benonsocial Yeah the demo video was literally the first time I ever touched after effects, so can't say it was the best... Thank you!
How did this wonderful idea come about?
Did it stem from someone's problem?
Awesome, congrats! Though the description might be a bit misleading - as far as i understand, this is for images only, not all files. But that might be just me, do not overthink it.
As someone who's spent way too much time searching for "that one PDF with the blue chart" or "that screenshot I know I took last month," this feels incredibly relatable.
Love the local-first approach as well, privacy shouldn't have to be a trade-off for smarter search.
Definitely giving Dotient a spin. Congrats on the launch, and excited to see where you take it next! 👏
Dotient
@jayant_siktia Thank you very much!