Everyone who runs a small shop has the same problem: a Downloads folder full of PDFs with names like "document_v3_FINAL2.pdf," invoices that never got filed, and scanned receipts nobody can find at tax time.
What's happening
This week, a small wave of indie developers independently shipped nearly the same solution as part of Hacktoberfest's Week 3 AI challenge. They all call it something like "SlothSort": point it at a folder, it reads your files using a local AI model, and suggests sensible names and subfolders. Nothing leaves your computer.
The stack is consistent across most versions: Gemma, Google's open-weight model, running via Ollama on your own machine. The model reads each document, decides what type it is (invoice, contract, photo, receipt), and outputs a rename and a destination folder. You see a dry run first. Nothing moves until you approve.
Aakif-Kohari/slothsort is a clean starting point: local-first, dry-run by default, built-in undo, and no external API calls. sufiankhan-dev/SlothSort wraps the same idea in a small desktop UI if you would rather click than type. Both work on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The models are tiny. The recommended Gemma 1B weighs under 1 GB and runs acceptably on a laptop without a GPU. The full stack is free: Ollama, Gemma, and the organizer itself.
Try this this week
- Install Ollama and pull the model:
ollama pull gemma3:1b - Clone one of the repos above and follow the README (Python, under ten minutes to get running)
- Point it at a folder of scanned invoices or downloaded PDFs and run with
--dry-runfirst - Review the proposed renames, approve the ones you want, let it move them
- Run it again on your shared drive or any other folder piling up with mystery files
The bigger picture
A tidy file system is load-bearing infrastructure for a small shop. Once files have sensible names and live in sensible folders, every other AI tool you try, whether for search, summarization, or retrieval, gets dramatically more useful. The fact that several developers independently shipped almost the same tool in the same week tells you this is a problem everyone has and nobody has time to fix. An afternoon with one of these tools might be the cleaning sprint your shop has been putting off since 2024.