We rebuilt Ubik from the ground up.
If you used Fiig, Precog, or an earlier version of Ubik Studio on the web, welcome back. You helped us figure out what actually matters, and this post is for you.
After hundreds of sessions, tons of feedback, and some hard lessons, we made a big decision: we sunset the web app and rebuilt Ubik as a native desktop application. Not because starting over sounded fun, but because it was the only way to build the tool our users deserved.
What was working
Fiig helped users search, gather, and analyze open-access papers from Semantic Scholar and arXiv. Unlike other AI tools at the time, you could read papers in-browser and annotate them yourself or through prompting.
Precog, our general agent, took that further. The core workflow our expert users loved: highlight text in a PDF, get an AI summary linked directly to the quote in-file, and generate text with real, verifiable citations. That was the breakthrough.
What wasn't
Gathering papers was painful. Downloading open-access PDFs and making them AI-ready took too long, especially in bulk.
Personal PDFs were worse. Upload times on the web app were brutal, and long documents with images slowed everything down. When agents tried to annotate these files, the friction compounded.
But when it worked, when an agent could highlight, annotate, and cite across a long document, the tools were genuinely powerful. Users spent more time in sessions. They trusted the output. They interacted with real information firsthand.
The problem wasn't the idea. It was the web app.
So we rebuilt local.
Here's what's different now:
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Local PDF storage. Your files stay on your machine. No cloud uploads, no waiting, no risk. Quick ingestion, digitally cloned.
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Seamless discovery. Papers found through database search in Ubik get downloaded to your local folder, added to your workspace, and saved to your personal library automatically.
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Save any webpage as a PDF. Build a personal knowledge base without friction. Clip a webpage directly into your workspace.
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Model freedom. Use any model you want. Frontier LLMs, experimental ones, local ones. We don't control how you work.
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Parallel agents. Run multiple agents with different tools and different models, all at once.
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A text editor with trace. Work with your analysis and annotations, insert direct quotes, or generate text with verifiable citations.
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Traceable citations. Every generated claim links directly to highlighted quotes in your workspace. Change citation format to fit your needs.
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Atomic evidence. Notes made by Ubik Agents break down claims across entire documents. We understand that quotes can be fragmented across many sections. Our agents capture those fragments and rebuild them into traceable summaries.
Your account is still live
If you signed up for Fiig, Precog, or early Ubik Studio, your account is still active. Nothing was lost.
We hope you enjoy the new Ubik.
Ready to get started?