Find Your Files, Faster & Better!

Beyond the Search Bar: Building a Local Context Engine for Windows

For several years, I’ve approached file search on Windows through the lens of a Product Manager, focusing on scale, user intent, and the delicate balance of a global ecosystem.

But recently, I felt a pull toward a different side of the craft: that of a “Product Builder”. With so many AI-native tools at my disposal, I wanted to see if I could create a local-first stack that didn’t just find files just by their names - but understood the “why” and “when” behind my daily workflow too.

The result is a two-part open-source stack - WARP and Find My File - tools designed to turn your local filesystem into an intelligent workspace.

The Infrastructure: WARP (Windows Activity Reasoning Platform)

WARP is the “core intelligence engine” of this stack. It is a lightweight background service that monitors your local environment to build a real-time context graph. It silently and securely learns what matters.

• Continuous Listening: It listens and learns from 3 different type of activities on the PC: file activity (create, open, modify), app launches, and browser activity. It is fully local, and none of this data ever leaves your PC.
• The 30-Day Pulse: All activity is stored in a local, rolling 30-day SQLite database, ensuring your data never leaves your machine.
• Intelligence through Decay: Every event updates a “recency score” (0–255) using exponential decay. The more you interact with a file, the more it “glows” within the engine.
• Developer-Ready: WARP exposes a Named-Pipe JSON API (\\.\pipe\WarpFileActivityAPI), allowing any local application to query this context and build its own intelligent features.

The Interface: Find My File

While WARP is the brain, Find My File is the high-performance muscle. It is a standalone search utility built for pure speed and precision.

• MFT Scanning: By accessing the Master File Table directly, it can index 4–5 million files in roughly 2–5 seconds, and perform searches on them in milliseconds.
• Advanced Search: Beyond simple matching, it supports fuzzy matching for typos, prefix/substring lookups, and stemmed matching for word variants like “walking” vs “walked”.
• Hybrid Search: Additionally, it can also merge local NTFS results with file content via the Windows Search Indexer and cloud results from OneDrive and Google Drive.

The Synergy: Better Together

The real “magic” happens when you run them in tandem. When Find My File connects to WARP, search results stop being a flat list of names.

Imagine searching for a generic term like “Config.” Instead of seeing hundreds of system files, WARP’s inference engine “floats” the configuration files for your active project to the very top because it knows you’ve touched them three times in the last hour. It’s a shift from chronological or alphabetical sorting to relevancy-based ranking.

A Call for Builders

I’ve released both of these tools under the MIT License because I believe the Windows community can take this “local context” idea much further. Whether you want to contribute to the core indexing speed of Find My File or build a completely new tool - like a context-aware AI assistant - using the WARP API, the doors are open.

Explore the Repositories (also contains downloadable binaries to try out):

• Find My File on GitHub
• WARP on GitHub

This journey from PM to Builder has reminded me that sometimes the most powerful tools are the ones we build to solve our own daily friction.

Can’t wait to see how you use it, and even better, build on top of this!