It started with a file I could not find.

The file

A colleague sent me a file. A budget with a chart in it, some time in the spring. I searched Gmail by the words I remembered and got nothing: it had arrived on Slack. I searched Slack and got nothing: wrong month, wrong person. It had been in Finder for weeks, under a name I would never have typed.

Twenty minutes, three good search boxes, each blind to the others, none willing to take what I actually had: a half memory with an error in it. That evening I wrote the first version of what is now AskFry. It ran the same vague query against every drawer at once and relaxed the detail that did not match.

Why local-first

The obvious way to build this is a cloud service that ingests your accounts. It is the wrong way, for two reasons that get stronger every year.

Hardware. A recent laptop runs a small language model and an embedding model comfortably. The compute that used to justify a server is under your hands. AI is moving home the way music and photos did, and search over your own life should make the trip first.

Sensitivity. An index of your email, files, chats and browsing is a profile, more sensitive than any single source. It should exist in one place, on your disk, and that should be provable. Local-first is not a feature. It is the constraint everything was designed under, and the verify page is where it is shown rather than claimed.

The arc

Search comes first. AskFry finds the thing across your sources, the way you remember it, wrong details included, and shows where it was and why it matched. Read-only, local, checkable.

Then it learns how you remember. Each result you open teaches AskFry which detail you had wrong, so the next search starts closer. That Recall profile is kept on your computer. Open Recall in the sidebar to export it or reset it.

On profiles

Most software that knows a lot about you knows it in order to sell it. The profile is the product; you are not its customer. We build the same depth of understanding with the opposite ownership: the profile is built on your computer, from your data, and stays yours. Nobody here can see it. Knowing you is not our business model. Finding your things is.

The founder

One technical founder. Every public release is in the changelog, with its fixes and known issues.