sift
Your documents stay yours.
Privacy-first document intelligence you can self-host, with citations on every answer.
Built for rooms that lock the door.
sift is a serious tool for legal, medical, research, and enterprise document work. The product bends around trust, not novelty.
Privacy first
Sensitive PDFs, contracts, and research corpora stay in your environment. sift is built for data that cannot leave the building.
Self-host by default
Run on your machines. Docker Compose today; Kubernetes and air-gap installers on the roadmap. Minimally opinionated about your models.
Grounded answers
Every chat reply carries source citations. Retrieval is hybrid dense plus BM25 with reranking, tied to your documents.
Air-gap capable
Designed to operate without outbound model calls when you need isolation. Prefetch models, run locally, keep the network closed.
What sift does
Point sift at a folder of documents. Get a searchable, chattable, agent-ready knowledge base.
Ingest
PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV, HTML, and images. Layout-aware extraction with confidence scores and human-in-the-loop review.
Retrieve
Hybrid dense and BM25 retrieval with reranking, grounded in your corpus.
Chat
Streamed answers with source citations, session memory, and verification.
Serve agents
A first-class MCP endpoint plus a REST mirror. Scoped, auditable access for LLM agents.
Vault
Markdown vault with wikilinks, backlinks, tags, and a graph view.
How it works
From a folder of files to a cited answer, in four steps.
- 01
Point at a folder
Drop documents into a watched path. PDF, Office, HTML, CSV, and images are accepted.
- 02
Parse and review
Layout-aware extraction produces structured chunks with confidence scores. Review low-confidence spans before they enter the index.
- 03
Retrieve
Hybrid dense and BM25 search with reranking returns grounded passages from your corpus.
- 04
Chat or serve agents
Ask in the web UI with citations, or give agents scoped access through the MCP endpoint and REST mirror.
Trust and deployment
sift is built for teams that cannot send sealed contracts or patient records to a third-party SaaS. Run it where the documents already live. Keep network egress optional.
- Self-hostable on your infrastructure
- Air-gap capable with local model prefetch
- Scoped agent access over MCP and REST
- Auditable retrieval and citation trails
- Human review for low-confidence parses
- CLI, web app, and Compose profiles
Status
Pre-alpha, in active development
The repository is intentionally sparse at the top level while the product is being built. Public artifacts land as they stabilize. External contributions are not open yet.