Quickstart¶
Five minutes from zero to "my AI can search my notes". You'll do all of this from your terminal.
Before you start
Make sure uv --version works in your terminal. If not, do Install uv first (one command).
1. Install Agent Library¶
Paste this into your terminal:
This installs Agent Library as a regular command on your machine — like installing any other CLI tool. The first run downloads the Python package and its language models (~2 GB total). You only pay this cost once; uv caches everything afterward.
Verify it worked:
You should see a help menu listing commands like add, search, serve. From here on, you just type librarian ... like any other terminal tool.
Updating later
To pick up a new release:
To remove it:
2. Index a folder of notes¶
Pick any folder that has text-like files — notes, markdown, PDFs, code. Let's say it's ~/notes/.
Agent Library walks the folder, parses each supported file (Markdown, code in 18 languages, PDFs, images), splits the contents into searchable chunks, and stores them in ~/.librarian/index.db. It'll print a progress summary at the end.
Supported file types
Out of the box: Markdown (.md), text (.txt), 18 programming languages (.py, .js, .ts, .go, .rs, etc.), PDFs, and common image formats (PNG, JPG). Other file types are skipped.
3. Search it¶
Three results print, ranked by how well they match. Each has a path, a snippet, and a relevance score from 0 to 1.
By default this is a hybrid search — it combines keyword matching with semantic understanding, so "retry policy" finds notes that talk about "exponential backoff" too.
Two other modes are available when you want them:
librarian search "exact phrase here" --mode keyword # exact-match only
librarian search "this concept" --mode semantic # meaning-based only
4. List what you've indexed¶
Shows every source you've added (folders or single files) with document counts.
You're set¶
The library now has your stuff. Next: tell your AI assistant about it.
If something didn't work, head to Troubleshooting.