PRODUCTIONSmartLemon
NOW SHOWINGReel 04 “Archi”
SmartLemon presents

Archi

in “Found by Meaning”
Painted cartoon lemon holding a book under one arm and proudly holding up a single index card, a small card-catalog drawer at his feet, in front of a warm sunburst.
A Mac app that makes Kindle highlights searchableProduct · 2026 · Written, designed, and built by Benjamin Loschen
Painted cartoon frame of a worried lemon on a library ladder between towers of bookmarked books, a book in each hand and one on his head, while a small lightbulb character shrugs on the floor.
SC.1Int. library, late
Act one · The problem

Years of highlights, and no way to find one.

Kindle keeps every passage you mark, then buries it. I knew I had underlined the right sentence somewhere and could not find it, because I remembered the idea and not the words.

Painted cartoon frame of the lemon pulling bookmark slips from a trolley of books with one hand and filing index cards into an open drawer of a large wooden card catalog with the other.
SC.2The card catalog
Act two · The build

Every highlight, pulled into one library on your Mac.

A desktop app that imports highlights from a Kindle export or your Kindle notebook into a local SQLite library. There is no account and no server. When you want them in Notion, it sets up the database on first run and syncs on demand.

Screenshot of Archi searching for evaluating a system that uses language models and returning fifty matching passages from a book on AI engineering, none of which need to share the exact words.
Still · Search by meaning
Screenshot of Archi listing passages similar to one chosen highlight about language models as judges, each with buttons to find more, open the book, or copy the quote.
Still · Find similar
Screenshot of an Archi book page showing the cover, title, and author above a column of highlights, each with its Kindle location and links to open in Kindle, find similar, or copy.
Still · One book
the real product, my own library
Painted cartoon frame of the lemon gesturing vaguely while the tin robot, on a stool at the card catalog, hands him one glowing index card and the lightbulb character jumps for joy.
SC.3The right card
Act two, continued

Search by meaning, with the model on your machine.

A small embedding model ships inside the app, about 32 MB, so search matches ideas as well as words. Keyword and meaning results are fused into one list and labeled, and nothing is sent anywhere. An optional chat over your passages runs on a local Ollama model.

Act three · The result

Free, signed, and updating itself.

Painted cartoon frame of the lemon reading one index card in a big armchair, lit by the lightbulb character sitting on the chair arm, while the tin robot salutes beside a tidy card catalog.
SC.4A good chair

Archi is open source under the MIT license, signed and notarized for Apple Silicon, and updates itself from GitHub releases. It went from first commit in May 2026 to version 0.3 in August, with 42 test files along the way.

From the storyboard

Pencil storyboard rough of the lemon on the library ladder with a book on his head, the first sketch of scene one.
SC.1 rough
Pencil storyboard rough of the lemon moving slips from the book trolley to the card catalog, with a red pencil arrow showing the way.
SC.2 rough
Cleaner pencil drawing of the tin robot handing the lemon one index card while the lightbulb character jumps for joy.
SC.3 tie-down

End credits · The stack

Desktop app
Electron, React, TypeScript
The library
SQLite with FTS5 and sqlite-vec
Embeddings
bge-small, running locally
Chat
Ollama, optional and local
Sync
Notion
Sources
Kindle export and Kindle notebook
Distribution
Signed DMG, auto-update, MIT license
The End?

Not if you want something like this.

Visit ArchiHow I work: AI and automation