Shopify CEO Releases QMD, a Local Search Engine for Your Notes—No Cloud Required

Tobi Lütke, Shopify's CEO, has released QMD, a hybrid local search engine that indexes markdown notes, meeting transcripts, and documentation entirely on your computer, reaching 30.5k GitHub stars. The tool combines three search layers—BM25 keyword matching, vector semantic search, and LLM re-ranking—all running offline via quantized models downloaded on first use. QMD addresses a fundamental problem Lütke identified after 700 coding sessions with AI agents: every interaction starts from scratch, losing context from previous work.