Spotlight — Install

01 — Mode Required

Frontier or Local.

FrontierUse a hosted model (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, or OpenCode). Faster investigations, higher quality, but queries go to the provider. LocalRun a journalism model on your own machine. Private by design — nothing leaves your laptop. Pick your harness; the installer preconfigures the inference server underneath.

02 — Local model

Hosted on your Mac.

Agent harness

OpenCodeRecommended. Native sub-agents — investigator and fact-checker run in independent contexts, preserving Spotlight's verification independence guarantee. Installer preconfigures Ollama as the inference server. PiMinimal TypeScript harness (pi.dev) with the pi-llama-cpp extension for model browsing. No native sub-agents — investigator and fact-checker share one context, weakening independence. Installer preconfigures llama.cpp as the inference server.

The installer uses opencode (opencode.ai, MIT) as the agent harness and Ollama to serve the model locally on 127.0.0.1:11434. opencode reads Spotlight's skills + AGENTS.md natively; native sub-agents handle the investigator/fact-checker pattern. Both install with one command.

The installer uses Pi (pi.dev, MIT) as the agent harness with llama.cpp (via the pi-llama-cpp extension) serving the model locally on 127.0.0.1:8080. Pi lets you browse/load/switch models from inside the harness. Note: Pi has no native sub-agents, so investigator + fact-checker share context.

Quick hardware probe — runs in your browser

Qwen 3.5 9B Journalist Default. 9B dense, abliterated, investigative-journalism fine-tune by @tomvaillant. Fits 16 GB Macs comfortably (~6 GB on disk, ~8 GB at runtime). Bench-tested: 100% refusal-resistance on OSINT-grade prompts, leads with the answer 100% of the time. Qwen 3.6 27B Journalist 32 GB Heavy tier. 27B dense, fine-tuned by @tomvaillant on the same investigative-journalism corpus as the 9B, built on Huihui's abliterated Qwen 3.6 base. Runs in thinking mode (the abliterated family's /no_think path is broken). Needs 32 GB unified memory minimum — the fit-check below confirms your hardware before this option is enabled.

9BDense — all params active

~6 GBdisk

~8 GBRAM at runtime

16 GBrecommended

Download size: ~6 GB for the 9B, ~15 GB for the 27B. The installer streams the GGUF from Hugging Face via curl; resume-on-interrupt is supported. The model lives at ~/Models/<repo-leaf>/; you can swap quants by re-running with MODEL=....

Download size: ~6 GB for the 9B, ~15 GB for the 27B. Progress streams live in Terminal via Ollama's native UI. Spotlight uses Hugging Face's tagged Ollama artifacts for both tiers: hf.co/tomvaillant/qwen3.5-9b-abliterated-journalist-GGUF:Q4_K_M (9B) and hf.co/tomvaillant/qwen3.6-27b-abliterated-journalist-GGUF:Q4_K_M (27B). To use another installed Ollama model later, set OLLAMA_MODEL and SPOTLIGHT_OLLAMA_ALIAS in .env.

02 — Runtime

Pick your AI agent.

Spotlight is a skill bundle — it runs inside an AI agent runtime you already have. Subscription runtimes (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) authenticate via their own login: no API key needed. Only OpenCode requires a provider key (pay-per-token).

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).

Using Spotlight with Claude Code

First time only: run claude login and sign in with your Claude Max / Pro account — no API key needed
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 — Tool discovery Required

OSINT Navigator.

A live database of 10,000+ OSINT tools with AI-powered lookup — essential for country-specific registries and niche techniques.

OSINT Navigator API key — Get API key

05 — Vault Required

Your investigative memory.

Spotlight archives verified findings into a Markdown vault as structured knowledge — entities, methodology, tools — with wikilinks and YAML frontmatter. Over time, the vault becomes your investigative memory.

Vault app

Obsidian Tolaria

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).

Install folder — where Spotlight itself should live on this Mac

Documents Code Home Custom

Folder name — Spotlight will be created inside the parent folder above

Final install path: ~/Documents/Spotlight

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

06 — Integrations optional external tools

Plug-ins.

dev-browserBrowser automation for specific investigative tasks: forms, JS-rendered pages, screenshots, downloads, and authenticated sessions. Installs via npm. No key required.

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

UnpaywallLegal open-access lookup for academic papers with DOIs. Optional; uses a contact email as a fair-use identifier.

All set? Generate your installer.

Install Spotlight.

Frontier or Local.

Hosted on your Mac.

Pick your AI agent.

Using Spotlight with Claude Code

Using Spotlight with Gemini

Using Spotlight with Codex

Using Spotlight with OpenCode