Sloth Tidy:let your AI clean your files

Punam Behera — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 17:11:47 +0000

WHAT I BUILT:

My files are named things like IMG_2231 and final_FINAL2, and I never clean them up. So I built Sloth Tidy. It reads the first few words of each file, and a local AI model picks a folder and a clean name. It shows me a plan first, moves nothing until I say yes, and has an undo command.

The AI is Gemma, an open-weight model, running through Ollama, which is open-source. The rest is plain Python.

EFFORT IT SAVES:

I no longer open every file, decide where it goes, and rename it. I just check the plan. For 4 demo files, sorting by hand took me about [X minutes], and Sloth Tidy made the plan in about [Y seconds].

DEMO:

I tested it on 4 fake files: maths notes, an electricity bill, meeting notes, and a Hinglish recipe.

Three of the four went to the right folder straight away. The recipe went to “Other” because I had no food folder, so I added a Food category. Then I ran undo, and all 4 files went back to where they started.

WHY OPEN-WEIGHT AI MATTERED

It is free, with no API key and no bill. I can swap the model by changing one line. On my own laptop it can run offline, so private files never leave my computer. For this demo I used Google Colab with fake files, so I did not test the privacy part on real files. And because I run the model myself, I could check every answer before using it. The AI only suggests, and Python decides what is allowed.

LIMITS

It reads only text files, and uses just the file name for PDFs and images.

CODE
https://github.com/P44-code/sloth-tidy

DEV Community: Punam Behera

Sloth Tidy:let your AI clean your files