Filer Usecase
Find the Near-Duplicates Before You Do
A Filer folder agent reads through a folder's files and points out which ones are near-duplicates of each other — reworded drafts, repeated exports — without changing anything itself.
- File event
- Right-click
- Chat
What you get
Drafts, downloads, and scanned copies pile up in the same folder over time, and some of them are really the same content with different wording or a "-draft" suffix. Figuring out which is which means opening each one and comparing by eye.
Point a Filer folder at the pile instead. Its agent reads the folder's files, compares what's actually in them, and tells you which ones look like near-duplicates — leaving the decision about what to keep or delete to you.
How to do it
Screenshots below are from a real run, using placeholder notes in place of real documents.
Needs: the multi-file-tools plugin, installed from Connect.
What it needs
- A Filer folder with a trust level that allows file- or schedule-triggered runs
- The multi-file-tools plugin, installed from Connect (reads several files in one batch)
- An inference endpoint — Local AI, Frontier AI (API key), or a local LLM server
Try it yourself
Download sample files for this walkthrough and follow the steps below on your own computer.
- your-folder — a planning memo and an unrelated recipe
- add-these-later — a reworded draft of the memo; dropping it in starts the check
- instructions.txt — the folder's instructions, also shown here
The folder's instructions
# Near-duplicate check Whenever a file is added to this folder: - Read all of the folder's .txt files together. - Compare what they say, not their names, and report which files are near-duplicates of each other (the same content reworded or re-saved), and why. - Say which files are not duplicates of anything. - Do not create, change, move or delete any file — this is a report only.
Three files, two of them alike
Two planning memos say the same thing in different words, and one unrelated file sits alongside them. A short instructions file tells the agent to read the folder's text files in a batch and report near-duplicates — read-only, nothing gets created or changed.
It reads them together and calls out the match
A file change is the trigger. The agent reads the folder's files together, compares their content, and correctly names the two reworded memos as near-duplicates while leaving the unrelated file out of the call — no file created or modified in the process.
What the agent actually wrote back "Near-duplicates: memo-v1.txt ≈ memo-v2-draft.txt. These two say the same thing, reworded — a re-saved draft of the same Q3 planning memo: … Support backlog: v1 'reduce by 20% by moving the top ten questions into the help center' ↔ v2 'cutting by a fifth, mainly by turning the ten most common questions into help-center articles' … Only surface differences: draft label/title, list formatting (numbered vs. bullets), and phrasing ('a fifth' vs. '20%'). Not duplicates of anything: recipe.txt — a tomato soup recipe; entirely different topic, no overlap with either memo. No files were created, changed, moved, or deleted."
The screenshots and outputs on this page come from a real run of Filer, not a mockup.
Where else this applies
The mechanism generalizes to any pile of text-based files where the same content might exist more than once under different names — not just planning memos:
- Downloads folder — the same file saved twice under a "(1)" suffix, or re-downloaded weeks apart.
- Email attachment archive — the same attachment saved separately from several threads it was forwarded through.
- Shared draft folder — several people's independent drafts of the same document, before anyone realizes they overlap.
- On a schedule instead — a folder that gets too many small changes to trigger a comparison on every one of them can instead sweep the whole folder for near-duplicates once a week on a schedule, rather than reacting to individual file events.
- Notify instead of reading in Filer — pair this with the same folder's Telegram or Slack connection so the near-duplicate call reaches you as a message instead of waiting to be read in Filer's own Activity view.
Other ways in
This is what the right-click path looks like on the same two files:
- Right-click
- Chat
- The walkthrough above shows a file-change trigger running the comparison on its own. The same batch-read comparison doesn't need a trigger at all: select files — or right-click a whole folder — and choose
Find Duplicatesfrom the multi-file-tools plugin, or just ask in chat, "find near-duplicates in this folder." All three paths call the same underlying batch file-read; the trigger is only how this particular run started. - Other automation triggers
- Not shown in this walkthrough.
- Other integrations
- Not shown in this walkthrough.
More usecases
Part of a guide: A folder that keeps itself in order: filing, indexing, and spotting near-duplicates
A Folder That Files Its Own Arrivals
A Filer folder agent sorts new documents into the folders you already keep — drop an invoice or a contract into the folder and the agent reads it, decides where it belongs, and moves it there.
- File event
- Chat
An Index That Never Goes Stale
A Filer folder agent notices when a file is added or changed and rewrites the folder's own INDEX.md to match — nobody has to remember to update it.
- File event
- Chat
- Right-click