Shlexball
Describe a file and a local AI model finds it on your Mac
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This is 1 of 77 launches in semantic search and rag tools — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →
24 other launches read as similar to this one →
Details
- External ID
- 1269609
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- Shlexball
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Oct. 5, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 2
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.76
- Tags
- Mac, Productivity, Artificial Intelligence
Description
Shlexball is a Mac app that finds files from a plain-English description, like "where are my github 2fa recovery codes". Its 1.5B model, fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B-Instruct, runs on your Mac and writes a search plan; a read-only sandbox runs it, so your files are never uploaded. It searches names, contents, PDFs and Word documents. macOS 15, Apple silicon, 16 GB. 30 free searches, then 9 USD a month or 59 USD a year.
Enrichment
- Niche
- semantic search and rag tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- local semantic file search for mac users
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A macOS desktop shell is simple, but fine-tuning a small local LLM to reliably generate bash/search plans and running it inside a secure sandbox requires ML fine-tuning and macOS systems programming.
What it would actually take: Requires native Swift/macOS development using Apple's App Sandbox APIs or hypervisor, bundled with a local inference engine like llama.cpp or MLX. The core challenge is curating a synthetic dataset to fine-tune the 1.5B model specifically for safe, deterministic CLI search planning across varied directory hierarchies and file formats without hallucinating destructive commands.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 24 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 25 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 90 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sorted · ph · 2026-10-09 · 70 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Shred Browser · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- FinderBuddy · ph · 2026-10-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- ASL Shredder · ph · 2026-10-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Files Magic AI File Rename & Organizer · ph · 2026-10-13 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Clipmory — Clipboard History for Mac · ph · 2026-10-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- PickClub · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Retrio · ph · 2026-10-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.