Hacker news

  • Top
  • New
  • Past
  • Ask
  • Show
  • Jobs

Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go (https://github.com)

106 points by kingcauchy 4 days ago | 43 comments | View on ycombinator

thefogman 4 days ago |

Interesting project.

I’ve got a project right now, separate vector DB, Elasticsearch, graph store, all for an agent system.

When you say Antfly combines all three, what does that actually look like at query time? Can I write one query that does semantic similarity + full-text + graph traversal together, or is it more like three separate indexes that happen to live in the same binary?

Does it ship with a CLI that's actually good? I’m pivoting away from MCP. Like can I pipe stuff in, run queries, manage indexes from the terminal without needing to write a client? That matters more to me than the MCP server honestly.

And re: Termite + single binary, is the idea that I can just run `antfly swarm`, throw docs and images at it, and have a working local RAG setup with no API keys? If so, that might save me a lot of docker-compose work.

Who's actually running this distributed vs. single-node? Curious what the typical user experience looks like.

neilsharma425 3 days ago |

10:30 AM The Termite bundling is the most interesting part. Packaging embedding and reranking inference alongside the database means no separate model server to manage and no network hop for every vector op.

Curious about resource contention though: if a heavy indexing job saturates Termite, does that affect query latency on the Raft side? And how does Termite handle model cold starts in single-process mode?

On the license: the ELv2 framing is honest and the "can't offer as managed service" carve-out is pretty standard at this point. Won't bother most people reading this.

KnowFun 3 days ago |

This is powerful. At KnowFun, we're building a platform to transform multimodal content like videos and articles into interactive learning paths. A core challenge is making this knowledge base searchable and discoverable. A system like Antfly could be game-changing for creating a 'memory' of the content, allowing users to find related concepts across different formats. How extensible is the system for custom content types?

derodero24 2 days ago |

Single-binary deployment is a huge win for adoption. Curious about the fuzzy text matching side — does the full-text search support approximate/typo-tolerant queries out of the box, or is that something you'd layer on top with the vector search path?

perfmode 4 days ago |

https://github.com/antflydb/antfly/blob/main/src/store/db/in...

Comment on the Pause method indicates that waits for in flight Batch operations (by obtaining the lock) but Batch doesn’t appear to hold the lock during the batch operation. Am I missing something?

schmichael 4 days ago |

As a longtime Raft user (via hashicorp/raft), I'm curious about your Raft implementation! You mention etcd's Raft library, but it isn't natively Multi-Raft is it? Is your implementation similar to https://tikv.org/deep-dive/scalability/multi-raft/ ? I'd love to hear about your experience implementing and testing it!

prosdev 4 days ago |

Of course the two most visionary people I worked with at Lytics went and built this. Just in time... this is the vector database I actually need. Termite is the killer feature for me, native ML inference in a single binary means I can stop duct-taping together embedding APIs for my projects. Excited to spend the upcoming weekends hacking on the Antfly ecosystem.

Linell 4 days ago |

This is very interesting! I noticed that your TypeScript SDK link results in a 404: https://antfly.io/docs/sdks -> https://github.com/antflydb/antfly-ts

undefined 4 days ago |

undefined

SkyPuncher 4 days ago |

Can you help me understand what type of practical features Graph Traversal unlocks?

I've seen it on a few products and it doesn't click with me how people are using it.

perfmode 4 days ago |

Curious why you decided to go with Go. Instead of Rust for instance.

didip 4 days ago |

in the query_test.go, I don’t see how the hybrid search is being exercised.

For fun I am making hybrid search too and would love to see how you merge the two list (semantic and keyword) and rerank the importance score.

mrprincerawat 4 days ago |

Was thinking to create something similar, well done!

jnstrdm05 4 days ago |

This looks sick!

Did you build this for yourself?

openinstaclaw 4 days ago |

[dead]

skwuwu 4 days ago |

[dead]

Aceshootzxx95 3 days ago |

[dead]

rigorclaw 4 days ago |

[flagged]