# LatticeSearch

**Find anything on your PC. Instantly. Privately.**

LatticeSearch is a local, offline, CPU-first semantic search engine for your whole file system.
It finds files by **meaning**, not just filename — photos by what's in them, documents by what
they say (in 100+ languages), audio by how it sounds, video by its frames and soundtrack, text
inside screenshots, faces by person. Everything runs on the machine you already own. Nothing ever
touches a cloud.

## What makes it different

- **Instant.** Searches the whole machine — 1.8M+ files — in about 90 milliseconds. The file
  explorer is faster than Windows Explorer. Folder-size answers come from RAM in ~30ms instead of
  a minutes-long disk walk.
- **Private.** No cloud, no telemetry, no subscription required, no NPU needed. An Incognito mode
  leaves no trace in the lattice.
- **A brain for your files** *and* **for your AI.** A built-in assistant (Lumen) answers in plain
  language; an MCP server + CLI let any AI agent on your machine use the lattice as its eyes and
  hands — measured at 44× fewer tokens and 12× faster than blind grep/dir walks.
- **Safe.** Every destructive operation is reversible — deletes are recovery-archived, syncs keep
  conflicts, backups are hash-verified. Nothing is ever silently destroyed.

## Start here

- **[Help & How-To](HELP.md)** — do things: search, browse, back up, sync, connect an AI.
- **[FAQ](FAQ.md)** — is it private? does it need a GPU? how much RAM? multi-user?
- **[All Features](FEATURES.md)** — every capability, grouped.
- **[Why LatticeSearch](USPS.md)** — the selling points, honestly.

## Go deeper

- **[How It Works](ARCHITECTURE.md)** — the tiers, the warm model host, why it's fast.
- **[API Reference](API.md)** — every HTTP endpoint.
- **[CLI Reference](CLI.md)** — every `lattice` command.
- **[AI Agents (MCP)](MCP.md)** — connect Claude, Cursor, any agent.
- **[Lattice Workspace](WORKSPACE.md)** — the warm, wired substrate for building at lattice speed.
- **[Developing](DEVELOPING.md)** — dev loop, warm host, lattice make.
- **[Privacy & Security](PRIVACY.md)** — the model, and its honest boundaries.

## The one-line mental model

The lattice is a **map, not a road.** It can't make a bit move faster or a CPU compute faster —
it makes sure you almost never move a bit you didn't need to. On a slow machine that's headroom;
on a rebuild that's a ~1000× cache hit; for an AI agent that's the difference between exploring
blind and knowing instantly.
