The service is composed of two open-source services, namely a Nextcloud app (Astrolabe) and backend (nextcloud-mcp-server). I use the service as an MCP server across a number of apps, and others use it primarily for semantic search over large numbers of documents.

Both are open source, and I'm working on a managed offering, completely based in the EU, for individuals/teams that already use Nextcloud and want to be able to use semantic search across some or all of their documents.

Essentially your data stays in Nextcloud, and the MCP server backend keeps a vectordb in sync to enable semantic queries over your content. The number of supported apps is growing, including:

- notes

- deck cards

- files

- news items (RSS feeds)

- cookbook recipes

- contacts & calendar

And I'm adding support for other apps as I go.

MCP Sampling (with tool calling) is one such example, where MCP servers will be able to generate responses using the MCP client's LLM - not requiring an API key themselves - including calling other MCP tools within the "sampling loop", and without corrupting the primary agent's context. This will generate an explosion in advanced MCP servers, although neither Claude Code, Gemini CLI, nor Opencode support this feature (yet).

Once MCP sampling becomes widely supported the pendulum will swing back and we'll see the boundary between MCP tools, async workflows, and generative responses begin to blur.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46942447

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

It leverages the nextcloud-mcp-server (same author) as the backend to enable AI workflows via MCP that you can use from any compatible MCP client such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Opencode, etc.

This is my first foray into NC app development, and I'd really appreciate any productive criticism. I learned a lot about php, authentication within Nextcloud, as well as semantic search. The Astrolabe app implements the interface to Nextcloud's Unified Search Provider, which means semantic search works from the global search bar. Search results include the page/chunk so if you click on a resulting PDF doc, the Astrolabe UI opens the PDF at the exact page that includes the result of your search.

In addition to various MCP tools, the nextcloud-mcp-server provides management APIs and the background processing required to embed your documents that can be searched via Astrolabe. It uses qdrant as the vectordb, supports NC webhooks for up-to-date vector embeddings.

For those aware, Nextcloud is pushing ExApps as the de-facto way of writing backends for Nextcloud apps. Astrolabe does not take this approach because it doesn't support more advanced MCP features such as streaming, MCP sampling, etc. Instead Astrolabe and nextcloud-mcp-server can be deployed as OAuth clients that only use app passwords for making requests to Nextcloud itself. This would enable more advanced multi-user scenarios for individuals, families, and small businesses that use Nextcloud as their source-of-truth.

I'm really looking forward to the increased interest in personal AI assistants, and this is my opinionated take on how something like this could be done in Nextcloud.

On a slightly related note, I recently completed a two-week POC on leaf.cloud, an EU-based hosting provider, to showcase how personal AI could work without having to buy GPUs yourself meanwhile keeping you in control of where data is processed.

https://blog.coutinho.io/eu-only-ai-stack-nextcloud-leafclou...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882479

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

For local deployments, Qdrant supports storing embeddings in memory as well as in a local directory (similar to sqlite) - for larger deployments Qdrant supports running as a standalone service/sidecar and can be made available over the network.

[0] https://github.com/cbcoutinho/nextcloud-mcp-server

The more time I spend online the more I'm convinced I have never had a unique experience.

I dread the day I have to get more involved in their healthcare from afar, precisely because of the technology gap. The money grab from big-pharma is going to unrelenting

How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.

What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.

Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers in the foot with this BS.

Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?

https://github.com/cbcoutinho/nextcloud-mcp-server

The default MCP server deployment supports simple CRUD operations on your data, but if you enable vector search the MCP server will begin embedding docs/notes/etc. Currently ollama and openai are supporting embeddings providers.

The MCP server then exposes tools you can use to search your docs based on semantic search and/or bm25 (via qdrant fusion) as well as generate responses using MCP sampling.

Importantly, rather than generating responses itself, the server relies on MCP sampling so that you can use any LLM/MCP client. This MCP sampling/RAG pattern is extremely powerful and it wouldn't surprise me if there was something open source that generalizes this across other data sources.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...

[1]: https://www.postnl.nl/campagnes/online-frankeren-vs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44951243

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

> Most language models face a fundamental tradeoff where powerful capabilities require substantial computational resources. We shatter this constraint with Jan-nano, a 4B parameter language model that redefines efficiency through radical specialization: instead of trying to know everything, it masters the art of finding anything instantly. Fine-tuned from Qwen3-4B using our novel multi-stage Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) system that completely eliminates reliance on next token prediction training (SFT), Jan-nano achieves 83.2% on SimpleQA benchmark with MCP integration while running on consumer hardware. With 128K context length, Jan-nano proves that intelligence isn't about scale, it's about strategy.

> For our MCP evaluation, we used mcp-server-serper which provides google search and scrape tools

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22760

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150956

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

I know nothing about your context, but in what context would a single model need to support so many permutations of a data structure? Just because software can, doesn't mean it should.

In addition to the code assistant, I configured a Grafana's MCP server with Cline, so that I can chat with an LLM while having real-time metrics and logs.

For context, I self host grafana in addition to a bunch of services on a raspberry pi. Simple prompts such as "why has CPU been increasing this week?" resulted in a deep analysis of logs/metrics that uncovered correlations I had never been aware of.

Incredible. I can only imagine what this will all look like in a few years

This reminds me of the excellent book 'Shape up' by the team from Basecamp. They also champion upfront 'scoping' to make best use of those six weeks. Highly inspirational book for technically mature organizations.

The biggest advantage openSUSE has compared to other mainline distributions is the openSUSE Build service (OBS). Contributing patches to existing packages is simple, and the build service also hosts custom packages in a personal rep - this let's me keep any custom packages up to date across all my systems. I believe it works with other distros as well so you don't even need to use openSUSE to utilise the service