Searching Your Own Documents

An attachment and a library are not the same tool

Attaching a document to a conversation solves exactly one question, in exactly one chat, and then the document is gone again. That is fine for a one-off. It is useless for the thing people actually want, which is: this body of material is the ground truth for my work, and I want to be able to ask it anything, from any conversation, for months.

A library is that. You upload contracts, specs, research, spreadsheets or notes once; StickyFriend reads each file and indexes it; and from then on any chat you point at that library can search it and quote from it.

What happens when you upload

A file goes through three visible stages, and the visibility is the point:

  1. Read. The text is extracted from the file. You watch each file’s status while this happens rather than staring at a spinner over the whole batch.
  2. Indexed. The content becomes searchable. Until this finishes, a chat pointed at the library will not find it.
  3. Failed, with a reason. If a file cannot be read, it is marked Failed and the reason is on screen, along with what would fix it. It is not quietly added as an empty document — which is the failure mode that matters, because an empty document does not error, it just makes the library confidently incomplete.

Answers name the file

When an answer comes out of your library, it tells you which file it came from. This is not decoration. A quote you can trace is a quote you can check against the original clause, the original spec, the original number — and checking is the entire reason you put your own documents in front of an AI rather than trusting its general knowledge.

Try this on day one

Ask your new library a question you already know the answer to, and look at which file it cites. Two minutes of that tells you more about whether the upload really worked than any progress bar.

Which chats can read it — the default is none

Each conversation picks which libraries it may read. The library button sits beside the Smarter toggle, above the message box, and shows the count on its face, so you can always see whether the chat you are in is reading your documents.

A chat with none selected reads nothing of yours and costs nothing extra, and that is the default. Pointing a chat at a library is a deliberate act, not something that happens because you once uploaded a file.

What gets read without OCR, and what needs it

This is the part that is usually explained badly, so plainly:

OCR sits on the bigger plans because it is the most expensive step in the pipeline — a model call per page or per image — not because of an arbitrary tier line.

What each plan allows

Libraries, files and storage are metered against your plan on the Libraries screen and in the extension, with a warning before you reach the ceiling instead of a refusal after it.

How to organise them so they stay useful

The honest limits

Libraries do not make the AI infallible, and they do not read a document you did not upload. A citation tells you which file an answer came from; it is still worth opening that file when the answer is going to cost you money. And on Silver, a folder of scanned PDFs is going to tell you it cannot read them — deliberately, and before you have built a workflow on top of a library full of blanks.

The full plan detail is on the pricing section, and the FAQ answers the OCR question in one paragraph if you want it even shorter.