Show HN: Deta Surf – An open source and local-first AI notebook (github.com)

Interesting! I'm very intrigued by the possibility of new forms of computer interaction made by breaking down app silos and linking data across various mediums. Something that caught my eye recently is Atuin Desktop, which seems to be a jupyter notebook style thing that runs your code natively.

The benefits of this is that I can connect this data, but in a computable medium. Does your product have any similar ability to bring code workflows "inside" the Surf application?

Atuin: https://github.com/atuinsh/desktop

Is this a pivot from Deta Space? Related code or totally different project?

Looks like a personal Notion, or Obsidian.

I would call this a note-taking app rather than a notebook, which to many mean computational notebooks like Jupyter.

Looks great, will give it a go. Unrelated, what did you use to make the promo videos on deta.surf? they look great!

Saw it on Twitter and was interested. But from the video and demos I immediately did not understand why Notebooks and Notes are two tabs? In my mind, a Note is IN a Notebook, not some separate adjacent item...

Looks to my like an effort to pivot from an AI embedded Browser after the ChatGPT Atlas release into a local system Browser.

I still don't see the advantage I get for my local system? Nearly all of the actions on the demo page are doable with chatGpt in one or three interactions.

Photos are not mentioned as subset of media. I wonder if there’s a use case applicable to picture metadata.

So it's basically Cortana for Windows in a brand new powerful AI LLM avatar? ;-)

Is this an open source equivalent to google’s NotebookLM? I can tell. How does it stack up features wise?

Kudos on the launch. Love the local-ai approach.

Regarding open models: what is the go-to way for me to make Surf run with qwen3-vl? Ollama?

As far as I understand any endpoint that supports the completions API will work?

https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/AI_MODELS.md

If I attach image context will it be provided to qwen3-vl? Or does this only work with the "main" models like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and so on?

Running a local LLM sounds like a solid use case, just not sure if it actually performs as well as the description claims.

Nice, congrats! Off-topic, you guys are based in Berlin? I just recently moved in. Any recommendation for meetups or groups pro AI/startups?

Looks interesting! What is the business model?

This is a neat app. Though when looking at the files in finder it looks like while some files are stored as '.md' files the sample md files only contain HTML.

It has been wild watching deta over the years.

They didn't pivot, they completely reinvented themselves. Twice.

I loved their first cloud offering, which they sadly abandoned.

Then they launched Space, which was kinda cool, but mostly weird and raised the question "why?". Also cancelled.

Surf looks mostly cool, although I also don't quite understand it. It seems like Notion with a different twist on AI. Not sure. Since I'm fairly happy with my Obsidian + Codex setup, I'll pass for now. The good news is, this one's open source!

I'd love to know how they're financing all of this. They have been around for years and users never even had the option to drop money in their lap. Now they're trying open source. Wild ride.

All the best!

PS: I would have paid for deta cloud Pro ;)

Yes

This seems to be a good open alternative to Atlas and Comet. I like the split-screen and local model usage!

Isn’t Marimo becoming the new standard for notebooks?

Hey, yeah, it looks cool. Could you share? What’s your plan? Financial model?