Search and extract data across thousands of files
Search thousands of files in seconds. The agent uses Grep, Glob, and File Read to find exactly what you need, extract the relevant pieces, and compile a structured summary.
- 1-click uninstall
- Cancel anytime
- Files never leave your computer
Impact
What changes
The same task, two ways — how it plays out by hand today, and what changes once Lapu AI runs it for you.
Without Lapu AI
A project manager spends an hour opening 30 meeting note files one by one, searching for budget discussions, copying relevant paragraphs, and assembling a summary in a new document.
With Lapu AI
Lapu AI greps all 30 files for budget-related content in seconds, reads the surrounding context, and produces a structured summary with source references — ready in under 5 minutes.
The challenge
Important information is scattered across hundreds of files — meeting notes, project docs, config files, log archives, email exports, legal documents. Finding a specific detail means opening files one by one, searching manually, and piecing together context from multiple sources. System search tools find filenames but cannot understand content or compile findings.
How Lapu AI solves this
Ask Lapu AI a question about your own files and it goes and finds the answer: searching across thousands of notes, docs, and exports in seconds, pulling out the relevant pieces, and handing you a clean summary with sources. Because it actually reads what it finds, it can connect details across documents and answer your follow-ups, instead of dumping a list of filenames the way system search does.
Searches run locally on your machine. Only the context needed for AI reasoning is sent to model providers.
Workflow
How it works
Define your search scope
Tell the agent where to look and what to find — for example, 'Search all markdown files in ~/projects/ for mentions of authentication and summarize what each project does for auth.' The agent uses Glob to locate matching files.
The agent searches and reads
Using Grep for content matching and File Read for context, the agent scans the target files, identifies relevant passages, and reads surrounding context to understand the full picture.
Get a compiled, structured output
The agent produces a summary — organized by source, with citations, key findings, and extracted data. It can write the results to a file, answer follow-up questions, or refine the search based on what it found.
Under the hood — for the technically curious
Under the hood, Lapu AI locates files by pattern and searches their contents with regex (powered by ripgrep, fast enough to scan tens of thousands of files in seconds), then reads the matches for context. For PDFs and Office files it first extracts text through built-in skills, then searches that. Only the context needed for reasoning is sent to the AI model.
Permissions it asks for
- Glob — to locate files by name patterns across directories
- Grep — to search file contents with regex patterns
- File Read — to read matching files and extract relevant sections
- Shell — to run supplementary commands (find, wc, sort) for deeper analysis
- File Edit — to write compiled summaries and extracted data to output files
Each is permission-gated — Lapu AI asks before it runs.
Just ask
Say it in plain words
No commands to learn. Tell Lapu AI what you want the way you would tell a coworker.
You
Search all meeting notes in ~/notes/ for any mention of the Q2 budget and compile the relevant decisions into a single summary.
You
Find every config file across my projects that references a database connection string and list them with the connection details.
You
Search the legal folder for all clauses related to termination across our client contracts and compare them side by side.
Ready to try this workflow?
Download Lapu AI and run it on your own machine. Free to start — see exactly what it looks like first.
- 1-click uninstall
- Cancel anytime
- Files never leave your computer
FAQ
Common questions
How fast is it compared to system search?
The Grep and Glob tools use ripgrep under the hood, which is extremely fast — it can search tens of thousands of files in seconds. Unlike system search, the agent also reads and understands the content, so it can summarize and cross-reference findings rather than just listing file matches.
Can it search inside PDFs and Office documents?
For text-based files (markdown, txt, csv, json, code), Grep searches directly. For PDFs and Office documents, the agent first uses built-in document skills to extract text, then searches the extracted content. It handles the format conversion automatically.
Does it work across different file types at once?
Yes. A single search can span any combination of file types — markdown notes, JSON configs, Python scripts, CSV data, text logs. The agent adapts its reading strategy based on what it finds.
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