Spotlight

01 — Mode Required

Local or cloud.

LocalRun a fine-tuned journalism model on your own machine. Private by design — nothing leaves your laptop. Uses pi (pi.dev) as the agent harness with a model pulled from Hugging Face. CloudUse a hosted model (Claude Code, Gemini, or Codex). Faster investigations, higher quality, but queries go to the provider.

02 — Local model

Hosted on your Mac.

Local server

OllamaCLI-first. The script installs it via brew, pulls the model, starts the service — nothing to click. LM StudioGUI-first. Visual app to browse Hugging Face, download, switch, and serve models. Recommended if you'd rather click than type.

The installer uses pi as the agent harness (pi.dev, MIT) and Ollama to serve the model locally on 127.0.0.1:11434. Both install with one command.

The installer uses pi as the agent harness (pi.dev, MIT) and LM Studio (lmstudio.ai) to serve the model locally on 127.0.0.1:1234. The app gives you a visual browser for Hugging Face models — no Terminal to pull or switch models.

Gemma 4 — 26B A4B MoE Light option — only 3.8B active parameters. Needs 16+ GB RAM, but even then investigation quality degrades: no thinking mode, no vision, little headroom for orchestration. Better for quick queries than full investigations. Qwen3.6 — 27B Uncensored Quality option — all 27B parameters active per token. Thinking mode, zero refusals, multimodal vision. Better for deep investigations and complex reasoning. Needs 24+ GB RAM.

26B A4BMoE — 3.8B active / 25.2B total

~8 GBdisk

~10 GBRAM at runtime

16 GB+recommended

Quick hardware probe — runs in your browser

Large download (~8 GB for Gemma, ~14 GB for Qwen). Progress streams live in Terminal via Ollama's native UI. If interrupted, re-run ollama pull hf.co/<model-repo> to resume.

Large download (~8 GB for Gemma, ~14 GB for Qwen). The installer installs the LM Studio app and the lms CLI, then opens the app. On first run: complete the setup wizard → go to Discover, search the selected model repo, pick a quant (Q4_K_M for minimum RAM, Q6_K for quality), download, then click Start Server in the Developer tab. spotlight will be ready once the server is listening on port 1234.

02 — Cloud provider

Pick your runtime.

Claude CodeAnthropic Claude (Opus / Sonnet) — covered by Claude Max or Claude Pro subscription. Strongest for methodology + fact-checking depth. GeminiGoogle Gemini — covered by Google AI / Gemini subscription. Good for long-context investigations. CodexOpenAI GPT — covered by ChatGPT Plus / Pro / Team / Enterprise. Fast, broadly capable. OpenCodePick a provider below — OpenRouter, Fireworks, or Together. Pay per token (typically cheaper than subscriptions for heavy users).

Anthropic API key — leave blank if you've already set it globally.

Using Spotlight with Claude Code

In any terminal, type spotlight — opens Claude Code in your Spotlight repo with all skills loaded
Tell it: "Start a Spotlight investigation on <your lead>"
Claude walks you through Preflight → Brief → Methodology → 5 execution cycles → Gate 1 review → Ingestion into your vault

Also works in the Claude Desktop app: open the Spotlight folder, Claude sees CLAUDE.md automatically. Covered by Claude Max / Claude Pro — no per-investigation cost.

03 — Web scraping Required

Firecrawl key.

Firecrawl API key — get a free one here

04 — Contact optional, recommended

Fair-use identifier.

Your email — used as a fair-use identifier when Spotlight queries Unpaywall and other open-access APIs. Never shared, never stored by us.

05 — Tool discovery Required

OSINT Navigator.

A live database of 1,000+ OSINT tools with AI-powered lookup — essential for country-specific registries and niche techniques.

OSINT Navigator API key — request access

06 — Vault Required

Your investigative memory.

Spotlight archives verified findings into an Obsidian vault as structured knowledge — entities, methodology, tools — with wikilinks. Over time, the vault becomes your investigative memory.

The installer brew-installs Obsidian if it isn't already on your Mac, then launches it so you can complete one small step below.

One manual step (Obsidian 1.12+)

Obsidian's CLI toggle can't be automated — you must click it once after the app launches:

The installer opens Obsidian for you
In Obsidian → Settings → General → Advanced → toggle Command Line Interface ON
That's it. Spotlight detects the obsidian command on its first run and prompts you again if it's missing.

If Obsidian is already installed and the CLI is on, the installer skips this step. If you haven't opened Obsidian in a while, verify you're on 1.12 or newer (About menu).

Vault path — full path to your Obsidian vault folder (or where to create one)

07 — Monitoring optional feeds

Live signal feeds.

ACLED conflict eventsArmed Conflict Location & Event Data — battles, civilian violence, protests. Free registration required.

08 — Integrations optional external tools

Plug-ins.

browser-useAgent-driven browser automation for complex forms and JS-rendered pages. Open source (MIT). Installs via pip. No key required.

JunkipediaMisinformation / narrative tracking database. Used by 100+ newsrooms. Application-based access.

All set? Generate your installer.

Install Spotlight.

Local or cloud.

Hosted on your Mac.

Pick your runtime.

Using Spotlight with Claude Code

Using Spotlight with Gemini

Using Spotlight with Codex

Using Spotlight with OpenCode

Firecrawl key.

Fair-use identifier.

OSINT Navigator.

Your investigative memory.

One manual step (Obsidian 1.12+)

Live signal feeds.

Plug-ins.

Run it.

Copy into Terminal.

One file, double-click.

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