I Built a Tool for the File-Naming Meeting Nobody Ever Schedules

Doug Bailen — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:53:12 +0000

Every shared drive I've ever worked on ends up the same way. Somewhere in a folder called Projects_final there's a file called Report_FINAL_v2_useTHIS_reallyfinal.docx, three people have their own private naming scheme for the same kind of document, and everyone agrees "we should really get organized" — right up until the meeting to actually decide on a convention never gets scheduled. Nobody's job is to call it, so it just doesn't happen, forever.

That's the actual problem. Not that people don't care, not that a good convention is hard to think of — it's that "let's agree on file names" never becomes an agenda item on its own.

What I built

File Librarian is a small PWA that generates consistent filenames and folder structures for whatever your team files. Pick a work area (Matters for a law firm, Projects for a general team, whatever fits your industry), fill in a few fields, and it assembles the name and folder path from rules you can see and customize — then either creates the real folders on disk (Chrome/Edge, via the File System Access API) or hands you a ZIP if your browser doesn't support that.

The part I think actually matters more than the generator itself: there's a facilitator mode ("Naming Workshop") built for running the real 20-minute conversation where a team agrees on a convention together — live, one person driving, decisions posted straight back into the app. It's not a generator bolted onto a meeting agenda; it's built around the fact that the meeting is the hard part, not the naming.

Once a team has a convention, it's just there — enforced by the tool every time anyone generates a name, not a document in a wiki nobody opens again.

One more thing it does

Since a convention here is just structured data, it can also export itself as a markdown guide meant to be pasted into an AI assistant's system prompt — so if you're using Claude or ChatGPT to help organize files, it actually follows your team's rule instead of inventing a reasonable-looking one on the spot. Small feature, but a real one, and one nobody else in this space has any reason to have built yet.

How it's put together, for the curious

React 19 + Vite PWA, no backend beyond license activation — everything about your customizations lives in your browser's localStorage, I don't see or store any of it. Ten industry "editions," one codebase, entirely config-driven.

Try it / tell me I'm wrong

The general-purpose edition is free to try: https://file-librarian-general.vercel.app

Here are the links to all current editions:

General — https://file-librarian-general.vercel.app
Law Firm — https://file-librarian-lawfirm.vercel.app
Real Estate Brokerage — https://file-librarian-realestate.vercel.app
Architecture — https://file-librarian-architecture.vercel.app
Design — https://file-librarian-design.vercel.app
Game Development — https://file-librarian-gamedev.vercel.app
Software Development — https://file-librarian-softdev.vercel.app
School (K-12) — https://file-librarian-school.vercel.app
Union — https://file-librarian-union.vercel.app
Personal — https://file-librarian-personal.vercel.app

Built solo, still actively working on it. Curious whether "a tool that finally makes the naming-convention conversation happen" lands as useful to anyone else, or whether I'm the only one who's ever cared this much about a shared drive.

DEV Community: Doug Bailen

I Built a Tool for the File-Naming Meeting Nobody Ever Schedules

What I built

One more thing it does

How it's put together, for the curious

Try it / tell me I'm wrong