Magpie
A shared visual brain for the team. Drop in a link, a screenshot, or a highlighted quote and Magpie enriches it — title, summary, category, thumbnail — then makes it searchable across every brand. Built because research kept getting done twice by different people.
- Drag-and-drop, paste, browser extension, and mobile share-sheet capture
- AI titling, summaries and auto-categorisation on every saved item
- Search operators: type:, status:, #category, by:me
- REST API with scoped tokens, so agents can read and write the library too
Status: Internal tool for my team across GearTOP, TapeGeeks, and the race. Not a public product.
The problem
Five people, six brands, and everybody bookmarking things in a different place. The same competitor teardown got researched twice in a month by two people who each thought they were starting from scratch. Slack links scrolled away. Browser bookmarks were private by definition.
The failure wasn’t a lack of a tool — we’d tried several. It was that saving something had to be faster than not saving it, and every tool we tried added enough friction that people quietly stopped.
What it does
Capture is the whole product. Drag a link in, paste a screenshot, highlight text and press a key, share from a phone, or click the browser extension. Two seconds, no form.
Enrichment happens after, server-side: it fetches the page, picks a real hero image rather than the site’s generic OG default, and uses Claude Haiku to write a title, a summary, and suggest a category. Thumbnails are rehosted into our own storage, so nothing breaks when the source site changes.
Then it’s searchable across the whole team — filtered by brand, status, category,
platform, or who saved it, with operators like type:video, status:queued, #seo, and
by:me.
The piece I use most: a REST API with scoped tokens, which means Claude Code can query the library at the start of a task and write findings back at the end. The research library and the thing doing the research are connected.
Build notes
React and Vite on the front end, Firebase for auth, data and storage, Cloud Functions for enrichment and the API, deployed on Vercel. Google sign-in is domain-gated with an allowlist on top.
One decision worth flagging: the enrichment function fetches arbitrary user-supplied URLs, which is a textbook server-side request forgery risk. It validates every redirect hop and every resolved address rather than just the URL you typed. If you’re building anything that fetches a URL a user gave you, that’s the check people skip.