[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Poly (YC S22) - Cursor for Files
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Poly (YC S22) - Cursor for Files
Hello world, this is Abhay from Poly (https://poly.app). We're
building an app to replace Finder/File Explorer with something more
intelligent and searchable. Think of it like Dropbox + NotebookLM +
Perplexity for terabytes of your files. Here's a quick demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0. Poly can search your
content in natural language, across a broad range of file types and
down to the page, paragraph, pixel, or point in time. We also
provide an integrated agent that can take actions on your files
such as creating, editing, summarizing, and researching. Any action
that you can take, the agent can also take, from renaming, moving,
tagging, annotating, and organizing files for you. The agent can
also read URLs, youtube links, and can search the web and even
download files for you. Here are some public drives that you can
poke around in (note: it doesn't work in Safari yet--sorry! we're
working on it.) _Every issue of the Whole Earth Catalogue_ :
https://poly.app/shared/whole-earth-catalogues _Archive of old
Playstation Manuals_ : https://poly.app/shared/playstation-manuals-
archive _Mini archive of Orson Welles interviews and commercial
spots_ : https://poly.app/shared/orson-welles-archive _Archive of
Salvador Dali's paintings for Alice in Wonderland_ :
https://poly.app/shared/salvador-dali-alice-in-wonderland To try
it out, navigate to one of these public folders and use the agent
or search to find things. The demo video above can give you an idea
of how the UI roughly works. Select files by clicking on them.
Quick view by pressing space. Open the details for any file by
pressing cmd + i. You can search from the top middle bar (or press
cmd + K), and all searches will use semantic similarity and search
within the files. Or use the agent from the bottom right tools menu
(or press cmd + ?) and you can ask about the files, have the agent
search for you, summarize things, etc. We decided to build this
after launching an early image-gen company back in March 2022, and
realizing how painful it was for users to store, manage, and search
their libraries, especially in a world of generative media. Despite
our service having over 150,000 users at that point, we realized
that our true calling was fixing the file browser to make it
intelligent, so we shut our service down in 2023 and pivoted to
this. We think Poly will be a great fit for anyone that wants to
do useful things with their files, such as summarizing research
papers, finding the right media or asset, creating a shareable
portfolio, searching for a particular form or document, and
producing reports and overviews. Of course, it's a great way to
organize your genAI assets as well. Or just use it to organize
notes, links, inspo, etc. Under the hood, Poly is built on our
advanced search model, Polyembed-v1 that natively supports
multimodal search across text, documents, spreadsheets,
presentations, images, audio, video, PDFs, and more. We allow you
to search by phrase, file similarity, color, face, and several
other kinds of features. The agent is particularly skilled at using
the search, so you can type in something like "find me the last
lease agreement I signed" and it can go look for it by searching,
reading the first few files, searching again if nothing matches,
etc. But the quality of our embed model means it almost always
finds the file in the first search. It works identically across
web and desktop, except on desktop it syncs your cloud files to a
folder (just like google drive). On the web we use clever caching
to enable offline support and file conflict recovery. We've taken
great pains to make our system faster than your existing file
browser, even if you're using it from a web browser. File storage
plans are currently at: 100GB free tier, paid tier is 2TB at $10/m,
and 1c per GB per month on top of the 2TB. We also have rate limits
for agent use that vary at different tiers. We're excited to
expand with many features over the following months, including
"virtual files" (store your google docs in Poly), sync from other
hosting providers, mobile apps, an MCP ecosystem for the agent,
access to web search and deep research modes, offline search, local
file support (on desktop), third-party sources (WebDAV, NAS), and a
whole lot more. Our waitlist is now open and we'll be letting
folks in starting today! Sign up at https://poly.app. We'd also
love to hear your thoughts (and concerns) about what we're
building, as we're early in this journey so your feedback can very
much shape the future of our company!
Author : aabhay
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-11-20 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
| akersten wrote:
| Hooking up the Internet to my filesystem is scary. What security
| measures are in place to ensure a compromise of your
| infrastructure doesn't compromise mine?
| bigyabai wrote:
| +1 for this - I don't trust proprietary software with access to
| my whole filesystem like this. Definitely not if a future
| update could change the pricing terms, introduce hidden
| telemetry or deprive me of the app on a whim.
|
| This app gives me the same heebie-jeebies as the "Warp"
| terminal that was heavily pushed (and then rebuked) on HN. I
| don't want to replace my file browser or terminal with a
| subscription service, full-stop. The most magical featureset on
| the market won't move my needle, but then again maybe I'm not
| the ideal customer for this kind of product.
| aabhay wrote:
| I'm not certain what exact scenario you are referring to. Do
| you mean if someone is able to install malware on our backend
| system will that malware get sent to you?
|
| Is there something in particular that we are vulnerable to that
| doesn't also affect Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive,
| OneDrive, etc.?
| encroach wrote:
| You are correct that, from a _security_ standpoint, your
| software is no different than any other software I install on
| my computer, since desktop computers have no sandboxing. But
| from a _privacy_ standpoint, it could be uniquely concerning.
|
| With Google Drive, I choose which files to upload. It doesn't
| have broad access to everything on my computer.
|
| Dropbox, iCloud, and OneDrive are just backup services, so in
| theory they could just back up your files as an encrypted
| blob and have no way to read them. Unfortunately, they don't
| encrypt them (which is partly why I don't use those
| services). But at least I have their "promise" that they
| won't read or analyze my files, which would make me feel
| better even if its a weak promise.
|
| On the other hand, your service, by nature, is reading an
| analyzing all of my files using a remote server.
| aabhay wrote:
| You choose which files to use in Poly, we don't scan your
| hard drive either.
|
| I don't know about the other services, but Dropbox _does_
| read your files. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-
| policy-faq
|
| > We may build models that identify keywords and topics
| from a given document. These models may be trained on your
| documents and metadata, and power features within Dropbox
| such as improved search relevance, auto-sorting and
| organization features, and document summaries.
| prasoonds wrote:
| This is really cool! I suck at organizing my filesystem and I've
| lost track of how many times I had to find _that ONE_ PDF which I
| KNOW I have but cannot find! This would have solved that many
| times over.
|
| However, at least for my use-case, this is a very infrequent
| problem. So, a monthly subscription and the security risk
| wouldn't be worth it. Though I'm certain there are people who
| work with files all day and for them, this might be god-send!
| aabhay wrote:
| Agree. One thing that we see our users doing more of is
| "NotebookLM style tasks" where they just drop in a bunch of
| files or ask the agent to download stuff and then start using
| the agent to do things. Summarize, create notes, answer
| questions, etc. We believe that an increasing amount of work
| with "files" will be stuff like this, and having a file system
| that can search all your files to do these things seemed useful
| enough for us to build!
| bangaladore wrote:
| Nitpick: Cursor for Files makes approximately zero sense to me
| given what I see here.
|
| Feedback:
|
| Supporting an enterprise air gapped solution of this clearly has
| huge value. It really doesn't matter where the data is stored if
| the indexing / embedding is happening on your infrastructure.
|
| Enterprises with compliance requirements are quite likely the
| types of clients looking for ways to save time searching through
| petabytes of data.
| aabhay wrote:
| I think the phrase is apt, actually, but it's not perfect:
|
| 1. We have an embedded agent that can read, edit, organize, and
| take actions on your files. This means it can read almost any
| media type, which is why it's "cursor for files" even though
| "isn't _cursor_, cursor for files?". In other words, Cursor is
| "Poly for text" :)
|
| 2. We provide you with an "IDE", I.e. a file browser. However,
| unlike Cursor we actually built our engine rather than relying
| on an existing open source one like VS Code
|
| Lastly, agree about the enterprise solution. All in due time
| for sure!
| bangaladore wrote:
| Part of the issue with the "slogan" is Cursor/XYZ jank IDE is
| already "for files". "Cursor for data" seems slightly better
| in my opinion. You are clearly using "Cursor" as something to
| draw familiarity to, But I suspect the bulk of your future
| target market probably doesn't know what "Cursor" is.
| aabhay wrote:
| Agreed. We chose it for the Hacker News crowd.
| Fraaaank wrote:
| I'd rather see a demo instead of a highly edited video with split
| second shots of the product.
| dang wrote:
| Isn't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0 (linked
| above) that?
|
| Here's what we always tell founders about demo videos: "What
| works well for HN is raw and direct, with zero production
| values. Skip any introductions and jump straight into showing
| your product doing what it does best. Voiceover is good, but no
| logos or music!"
| Fraaaank wrote:
| My bad, totally missed the link in the text post. I clicked
| on 'watch video' on the Poly website
| dang wrote:
| Ah good! I was wondering if I'd missed something.
| aabhay wrote:
| The video I provided was a raw, uncut, video. The editing is
| done by Screen Studio, which only does the "zoom" effect. But
| there's no studio magic there. I didn't speed anything up or
| cut out buggy bits or even do a retake!
| saadatq wrote:
| When I read "Cursor for Files" my mind went to "app for reading
| and diffing content (i.e markdown) which I was very excited
| about.
| aabhay wrote:
| Haha, we might need to actually build this feature!
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| While it seems like a cool enough product conceptually, in
| practice there is absolutely zero chance I'm putting my files in
| your cloud to be garbelled up by AI and paying you for the
| privilege. Also, allowing an agent to download arbitrary files
| from the internet is extremely alarming. nope nope nope nope NOPE
|
| Only way I would ever use something like this is with a
| local/self-host model that I run myself on my own hardware, with
| meticulous control over what the thing can access on the
| internet.
| aabhay wrote:
| Great user name for sure!
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Can you say more about how Polyembed-v1 handles video files? Does
| it handle the audio or just the video? What do you do about
| videos longer than a couple of minutes?
| aabhay wrote:
| It handles both video frames and audio-in-video. So if you
| wanted, you could search for something that was said in a video
| and it'll find you the exact segment of it!
|
| We don't use transcription or any post processing. We simply
| embed the file. Our embedding has an additional inner dimension
| to support long duration content. So it's [N x D] where D is
| the embed dimension and N is an internal dimension that varies
| on the content.
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| Cool idea.
|
| Maybe I'm too old, but after I read the post I thought -- oh this
| is an "AI-first Quicksilver" -- who remembers that plugin for
| Mac? I don't think they stayed relevant enough
| aabhay wrote:
| I remember Quicksilver! That's not what we do though. You're
| thinking of stuff like Alfred, Spotlight, Raycast, etc.
| redhale wrote:
| My immediate hesitance with a tool like this (which sounds
| awesome) is that I don't actually trust tools like Claude Code
| unless I have them running in a git directory where I can see
| exactly what changed, and easily revert when needed.
|
| Do y'all have a solution for this here? Some kind of safety layer
| of some kind to easily review and optionally revert actions the
| agent has taken across my entire file system?
|
| The search part of this is cool, but if the write side is solved,
| shut up and take my money.
| aabhay wrote:
| We're adding that feature to be able to manually approve
| agentic actions! You can already revert things, as our file
| system is fully version controlled.
| lumirth wrote:
| Genuine question: why is that a feature that you have to add,
| instead of something foundational? Most folks, I'd wager, are
| sloppy about backups, so a level of manual control and
| oversight seems vital!
| aabhay wrote:
| Hm.. I think because the requirement for approval adds
| additional arms to the state machine. And the approval step
| is a message you send to the server that you don't want
| passed straight to the agent so it doesn't follow the rest
| of our pattern.
|
| Stupid, not good, unsatisfying reasons I agree!
| 101008 wrote:
| The landing makes focus on multimedia, but I am writing a non
| fiction book, and most of my sources are links, PDFs, docs with
| notes, etc. Would it work in that case as well? My ideal solution
| should be able to oganize my files and be able to ask questions
| about the contents.
| aabhay wrote:
| Yes it does! We support web links, PDFs, documents (with
| annotations!).
| articulatepang wrote:
| Won't this only work when connected to the internet? So I can't
| use it on a flight.
|
| Or if I work in finance, or healthcare, or law, or government, or
| a hardware design company, I don't want my files leaving my
| network. Those are very important use cases, much more important
| than searching my personal laptop. I want this for WORK, not my
| little photo collection or notes or whatever.
|
| This is a great use case for modern LLM/embedding models but
| gotta be local to be actually useful in the places where it's
| most needed.
| milst wrote:
| Very interested in the idea of an AI being able to interact with
| my filesystem.
|
| we experimented with something like this: https://local-note-
| taker.vercel.app/chat
|
| repo in case you'd rather run it locally:
| https://github.com/tambo-ai/local-note-taker
|
| Curious to compare how our two ideas are built differently, feel
| free to reach out (email in my profile)
| pgt wrote:
| Greplin was just too early.
| aabhay wrote:
| There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
| mifydev wrote:
| Great idea, but the landing page visuals is too cluttered, makes
| me want to have cursor for your website
| aabhay wrote:
| That's literally the point! <3
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-20 23:00 UTC)