LookyHere

Why I made this

For better or worse, my memory is not the best. I know I bought some spare lightbulbs, I know I put them somewhere in the house, but I have not seen them since. It happens with more than lightbulbs. A friend mentions something in passing and I want it back six months later. My partner offhandedly mentions something they would like for Christmas. There was a bar I liked on a trip a few years ago and I have no idea what it was called.

Apple Notes and Reminders have been fine for this. I just don't love it. Things go into a pile I never open again, and I didn't want to graduate to some elaborate system I'd have to keep feeding for the rest of my life.

Then I heard ATP #697, where a listener had written in about using the new Siri as a second brain. It was roughly the thing I'd been circling for months without having a name for it. The same episode handed me the term squirrel list: the small stuff you stash somewhere and dig up later. I liked that a lot more than "notes app." A squirrel list doesn't ask you to be organized. It just has to hold the thing until you come looking, which is a much lower bar and, for me, the only one that was ever going to work. So I wanted something open and simple that Siri could just tap into. That's the goal I'm building toward: asking "where is my passport?", "where are the spare bulbs?", "what's John's favorite color?" and getting the answer straight from my own notes. A first cut of that already works: say "Ask LookyHere where the spare bulbs are" and it reads back what you wrote, word for word.

Elephant in the room

Yes, it was vibe coded. No point dancing around it: this app was written by AI. Once I had the idea, I started wondering whether AI was good enough to build it. I already have to use it at my day job, whether I like it or not, so I figured I'd find out how far these models have actually come. Could one build an app I don't hate? Something that doesn't feel clunky?

I have complicated feelings about that. I'm not thrilled. I'm telling you up front because you'd rather know now than find out later.

I have a background in tech and can write simple code, just not Swift, so no, I could not have built this on my own. But I knew enough that I wasn't pointing at things at random or guessing my way through every problem.

The icon is AI too, and it's a placeholder. Using AI for art and media sits worse with me than using it for code. If this app ever properly ships, hiring a real icon designer is first on the list.

LookyHere is free, it's a personal project, and it's honestly an experiment. Use at your own risk.

And look, maybe this doesn't work the way I think it will once iOS 27 and the new Siri actually land. Maybe I built it wrong, or someone ships something better next month. Any of that is fine. I'm using it every day, and if it ever stops earning that, I'll go find something else.

Four kinds of pages

• 📦 Items A note, some photos, and where the thing lives. When the air filters are due to be changed again. Who you lent the drill to. Add checkboxes and it turns into a checklist.
• 📍 Places A city, or just a place. The spots you liked, on a map, with your own notes on each one. Everything worth remembering about that one cruise ship, or that one coffee shop in a city you visited once.
• 👤 People Little notes about someone, piling up over time. Their favorite color, the book they wouldn't stop recommending, the thing they're allergic to.
• 🐾 Pets Same as people, plus the vet and the microchip number you can never find when you need it. The food they love, and the food they will not touch.

You are not locked in

This was the one hard requirement. LookyHere doesn't hold your notes hostage in a database you can't open. Every page is a plain Markdown file in your iCloud Drive, with the photos sitting right next to it. And the app only gets its own folder in there; it can't see the rest of your iCloud Drive.

LookyHere/
  Pages/
    People/  John-Appleseed-3f9c1a2b/  *
               John-Appleseed-3f9c1a2b.md
    Pets/    Hopper-a12b34cd/
    Places/  Orlando-7e21ab12/
    Items/   Spare-lightbulbs-b8d4e5f6/

* The eight characters on the end are the front of that page's unique ID. They're there so two pets named Hopper don't fight over the same folder. The full ID lives inside the file, so the name itself is only for your benefit, and nothing breaks if you rename it.

Open them in Obsidian, Bear, iA Writer, Notes, or anything else that can read Markdown. If LookyHere vanishes tomorrow, you still have everything. If you hate it, you walk away with your notes. And there's a safety net: one tap in Settings zips the whole shoebox into a backup, the app quietly keeps a weekly one of its own, and restoring never deletes anything.

The AI is on a short leash

There's some AI in the app, and I've kept it to the boring jobs: pulling facts out of a note you already wrote, suggesting an emoji, widening a search so "spare bulbs" also finds "lightbulb," reading the text in a photo so the receipt you snapped is searchable.

It's Apple's on-device model. Nothing you write ever leaves the device. No account, no server, no cloud model, and one switch in Settings kills all of it. And it only works from what you actually wrote. It doesn't get to invent facts or guess at what you meant. I don't trust it that far, and neither should you.

If you join the TestFlight

Treat all of it as provisional. The design, the four kinds of pages, what things are called, where the buttons live: any of it can change, and some of it will. It's possible this never ships at all.

Feedback is always welcome. TestFlight has a button for it, or you can email me.