Witchcraft and Pickbrain
fast multi-vector semantic search in Rust
Details
- External ID
- 47792166
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Witchcraft and Pickbrain
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2808483290488432
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Witchcraft is from-scratch Rust reimplementation of Stanford's XTR-Warp (SIGIR'25, https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17788 ) multi-vector semantic search engine. Witchcraft runs out of a single SQLite database, is blazing-fast (21ms p.95 end-to-end search latency on NFCorpus on a MacBook Pro), accurate (33% NDCG@10), and easy to deploy in your own apps. The Witchcraft repo also comes with Pickbrain, a sample app and agent skill that you can use to instantly query across all your Claude Code and Codex CLI sessions, effectively giving your agents global long-term memory. Please see the Github page for more details, and feel free to ask questions here, and I will try to answer them.
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- multi-vector semantic search in rust
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Reimplementing Stanford's cutting-edge XTR-Warp multi-vector information retrieval engine in performant Rust requires advanced algorithms and systems engineering.
What it would actually take: The implementation requires low-level Rust systems programming, SIMD-accelerated vector similarity computations (MaxSim operations), and SQLite custom C/Rust extensions or virtual tables. It involves implementing complex indexing structures, token-level multi-vector late interaction scoring, and memory-mapped inverted files from academic papers (SIGIR'25). Developing this requires deep expertise in modern information retrieval research, data structures, and native performance profiling.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 49 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 50 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 154 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.