The Three Changes That Matter
Over the last quarter, we shipped three focused improvements to AiFiler. None of them are flashy. All of them solve real problems we heard from users.
View Mode now ignores your theme. Document viewers render in white-paper style regardless of whether you're in dark mode. This sounds cosmetic—it's not. Reading a contract on a dark background is harder. Your eyes work differently on white. We forced it.
Command Palette unified. We had three separate command entry points scattered across the app. One for document creation. One for general commands. One for table operations. We collapsed them into a single Universal Command (Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+A on Mac). One palette. 87 intents. No hunting.
File parsing got faster. The ingestion pipeline now batches document processing more efficiently. Large uploads that took 45 seconds now take 28. Small files are nearly instant. This matters when you're uploading a folder of contracts or a year's worth of invoices.
Why We Built These
View Mode: We watched users squint at documents in dark mode. Some opened the same file twice—once in AiFiler, once in their PDF reader—just to read it comfortably. That's friction we could eliminate. The fix was simple: force white paper style on document viewers, let the rest of the app respect theme preference. Done.
Unified Command: Three command palettes meant three mental models. Users had to remember which palette did what. Some commands only existed in one palette. Others were duplicated. The Universal Command consolidates all 87 intents into one place. You press Ctrl+Shift+A and everything is available. No guessing.
Faster Parsing: File ingestion was bottlenecked at the document processing layer. We were processing files sequentially. Now we batch them intelligently—respecting API rate limits while maximizing throughput. A 10-file upload that used to take 3 minutes now takes 90 seconds.
How It Works
View Mode (White Paper Style)
Open any document in AiFiler. The viewer renders in white background with black text, regardless of your app theme. This applies to PDFs, Word documents, and spreadsheets. Your theme preference still controls the sidebar, navigation, and settings panels.
The change is automatic. No settings to flip. No opt-in. If you were struggling to read documents in dark mode, this fixes it.
Universal Command
Press Ctrl+Shift+A (or Cmd+Shift+A on Mac). A single command palette opens.
Type to search across 87 intents:
- Document creation: "new doc", "new sheet", "new presentation"
- Navigation: "go to inbox", "go to archived"
- Batch operations: "move", "delete", "tag", "share"
- Workspace: "settings", "members", "billing"
- Search: "find", "advanced search"
- Knowledge operations: "create edge", "view graph"
Each intent is tagged with its category. Results are ranked by frequency and recency. If you use "move documents" often, it bubbles to the top when you type "move".
The old command palettes still exist in their original locations—we didn't break anything—but the Universal Command is now the fastest path to any action.
Faster File Parsing
Upload a folder of documents. AiFiler now processes them in parallel batches instead of one-at-a-time. The parser respects Anthropic API rate limits, but within those constraints, it maximizes throughput.
You'll see the upload progress bar move faster. Large batches that used to stall now complete in a fraction of the time.
How to Try It
View Mode: Open any document. It's already white. Nothing to do.
Universal Command: Press Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on Mac). Start typing. Try "move", "tag", "new doc", "settings". Notice how every action is available from one place.
Faster Parsing: Upload a folder of 10+ documents. Watch the progress bar. Compare it to your last large upload. It should feel noticeably faster.
What's Coming Next
We're working on three things:
Search refinement. The search parser is getting smarter about intent detection. When you type "contracts from Q4 2024", the system should understand you want documents tagged "contract" with a date range, not a full-text search. This is harder than it sounds—natural language is messy—but it's worth doing right.
Knowledge Graph visualization. Right now, relationships between documents exist in the database. You can't see them. We're building a visual graph editor so you can see how documents connect and edit those connections directly.
Offline-first document access. AiFiler uses SWR with localStorage prefixing for offline-first data fetching on matrices. We're extending this to document viewing. Open a document once, and it's cached locally. No network needed to re-open it.
The Principle
These three changes follow the same principle: remove friction where it exists. Don't add features. Don't add complexity. Make the core experience faster, clearer, and less annoying.
That's the work for this quarter. More coming next month.
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