Thanks for this.

You forgot about the Deta Studio and the Horizon desktop app ;)

But on your question -- we're backed by supportive investors, and try to be frugal (we've had our fair share of sardines & rice).

hey Pietz, have you written up your obsidian + codex setup? I'm a die-hard obsidian user, didn't like codex 6mo ago but heard it's gotten much better, so I'm very interested if you're willing to share TIA!

In either case, I am just happy that Knuth's idea of Literate programming is becoming more and more of a common reality after so many years.

Thanks for the link, super interesting!

We have a super early form of runnable code, called "Surflets". More info here: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md

Basically you can supply input context and a runnable file will generate & run in your document. Useful for creating interactive charts or small applets.

Our philosophy is that if you want to update it, you should be able use your local code editor, not be stuck in Surf!

(we have work to do to make this solid)

Thank you.

Yes, we support any endpoint that supports the completions API. And yes, Ollama might be the easiest to setup. The images should also work with qwen3-vl.

But if you run into any issues, please feel free to submit a bug report https://github.com/deta/surf/issues

Edit: fixed github issues link

Yes agree, the Notebook / homepage UX still needs work.

We recently introduced a sidebar (after the video was made) which has them organized as you mention.

Thanks for the input.

We took inspiration from analog notebooks as a tool for thought, but wanted something for multi-media. We also see NotebookLM as the closest mainstream product to Surf.

Related -- some people who have seen Surf's Applets feature have also called Surf "Jupyter for normies".

More on Surflets: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md

We are in Berlin. Welcome!

Don't know too many, unfortunately. AI Tinkerers organizes a few a year: https://berlin.aitinkerers.org/

big thanks for the praise!

for all the screen recordings we use Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak. Really a all in one workhorse for everything screen recording related.

The main teaser video was made by our incredible video editor Célestin (https://www.celest.in/) who is working with After Effects, Premiere and Blender.

Yes great point. Photos are intended as a very important subset of media.

Not (yet) super usable, but for photos we have local OCR running, with Surf creating additional metadata (e.g. the link from where the photo was downloaded).

Can imagine some use cases -- off the top of my head, suggesting the right photos to embed in a note in response to a user query.

We see NotebookLM as the closest thing!

Surf is built entirely on editable WYSIWYG documents, NotebookLM's main AI is built on chat. Surf is built to be a bit more open, NotebookLM was a bit locked down for our taste.

An example I'd highlight is taking notes against a PDF.

NotebookLM will convert the PDF to simple text, and the chat responses are read only. NotebookLM also has a lot of strict walls between chat, artifacts & sources. You have to "save" responses as (read only) notes, and move notes to sources.

With Surf you can generate notes that deep link to specific pages in the PDF, and Surf will open those pages in the original PDF. You can remove the fluff you don't want in your notes. The intention is to be a little more open -- all notes are sources from the get go, you don't have to save or migrate anything.

Ah that might be a bug sorry, the sample notes should also have the html extension. The notes themselves are currently stored as html (because of the metadata and the state in notes mainly, you can still export to markdown).

We need to do some work before we can also just store them simply as markdown files.

Thanks!

One big distinction: we aren't trying to automate people's browsing / clicking, but augment people's thinking.

This creates a different feature set / model: tabs feeding into a document vs a chat going off and automating activity in tabs.

Many ideas are inspired by Space, but totally different codebase.

The big difference UX wise between chatbots and Surf is that Surf is built entirely on editable documents that you can mold / craft into an output (vs chat).

We actually had a chatbot, but our explorations showed that notes were a more effective in many cases!

An example of local data is that "Applets" made in Surf can be opened / updated from your local code editor, they're just HTML files.

Umm -- not being tied to ChatGPT? Like, that's huge. I personally do not consider consistently using any AI tool unless it has a local option. I've been air-quotes "paranoid" about things like this my whole life and it's served me QUITE well.

> Isn’t Marimo becoming the new standard for notebooks?

In my experience, sorta kinda for certain uses but not entirely replacing other options. Marimo is great for when you want to build a more "app-like" notebook that does a task repeatably (it really beats Jupyter at this, even given JupyerWidgets), but for pure experimentation and playing with code, Jupyter Labs still rules the roost for me. I keep both installed for the different purposes that each excels at. This one may fill yet another need. Dunno yet until I give it some play-time.

Great question. We'd look at Obsidian as a reference.

We think there are a lot of value added services that can happen when you need servers, but they should be user aligned & optional (Mobile app, sync, publishing, backups, remote jobs, collab).

We want Surf's client to be independent & open, but offer some of these on top -- for people who want them!