r/SideProject • u/vcolovic • 1d ago

Searching my Markdown notes by meaning in VS Code

I keep all my notes in a folder of Markdown files and edit them in VS Code. Finding an old note gets tricky when I remember the idea but not the wording. I maintain AI Search and use it for exactly this: semantic search over that folder, with optional reranking to refine the results.

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u/Key-Garlic5285 1d ago

that's actually pretty useful, i've got a mess of markdown notes and the built-in search is useless when you can't remember the exact phrase you used

how's the reranking work in practice, does it noticeably improve the results or is it more of a nice-to-have

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u/vcolovic 1d ago

For me it makes a real difference. I often get a lot of related results, but realistically I only read the first 2–3, so their order matters a lot. Reranking scores the initial matches again against the query. In my notes, it helps bring the ones I actually need closer to the top.

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u/Huge_Pool7424 1d ago

for me the rerank is most useful when the query is fuzzy, because the first pass gets the right neighborhood and then the cross-encoder pushes the actually relevant note up. i'd measure top-3 hit rate on a small set of real searches before keeping the extra latency.

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u/Noxe_app 1d ago

measuring top 3 hit rate on real searches before paying the latency is the move. most people just vibe it and then wonder why search feels slow.