ORBIT

A developer I interviewed searched for ChromaDB, then vector database, then architecture decision. The file was called ADR-004 and Spotlight cannot read inside a plain text file, so nothing came back.

They had written it themselves, three weeks earlier. Orbit is the answer to that half hour: you describe what you are looking for, and it reads what is inside the file instead of matching the name. Nothing gets renamed, nothing gets moved, nothing leaves the machine.

A fourteen-question survey went out online and reached thirty working professionals across design, code, music, video and data. Ten talked to me afterwards, in person or over a call, with their real file systems open on screen, and I coded the transcripts thematically.

Everyone described a system, then described the week it collapsed. A filmmaker keeps folders per project and finds things by sorting on date modified and hoping. Six raised privacy before I asked, each naming something specific: NDA-bound code, unreleased music, footage of people who never consented.

I designed a conversational assistant first, because in 2026 that is the obvious shape. One participant dismantled it in a sentence: they did not want a conversation, they wanted to type something and see their file.

Retrieval is a utility, so the assistant became an overlay with one input. The first build then failed in ways that were entirely mine.

The shortcut collided with Spotlight. Indexing ran silently, so people assumed it had stalled. Clicking outside the overlay threw away the results.

The interface is deliberately cold: black panels, one orange reserved for anything actionable, mono type for paths, timestamps and scores. Orbit does not greet you or perform enthusiasm, because it should read as a good tool rather than a friendly companion.

That left the problem of showing what the system was doing without a status bar. It ended up in one object. The orb breathes when idle, tightens as you type, pulses while it works, then slides left as results take the right of the screen.

The same ten people ran the same three tasks on v1.0. Retrieval went to 100%, Spaces to 90%, and mean satisfaction from 3.32 to 4.11 out of five.

Seven said they would put Orbit into their working week as it stood. The three who hesitated wanted the same missing thing: audio, video and image indexing, which the vector store already supports and the ingestion pipeline does not yet reach. That is the honest edge of the build.

The interface is built almost entirely out of four near-blacks, separated by a few points of luminance rather than by hue. That sounds austere until you see what it buys: when the only saturated thing on screen is the retrieval itself, attention has nowhere else to go.

Orange marks what the machine is doing, green what it finished, blue what it found. Nothing decorative is allowed any of the three. Syncopate carries the wordmark and the display line because its wide letterforms read as instrument panel rather than app, and Space Grotesk does the reading work underneath it.