v0.beta.2026.08.11(v0.beta.2026.08.11)
Flashback Mode
Hello friends, new and old! It’s been a few months since our last version update, and we finally wanted to share what we’ve been working on, as part of our larger vision of the agentic file system.
Today we launch Flashback Mode, a fully batteries-built-in “Time Machine”-style backup capability for your Poly files, with zero setup and instant real-time access to your files at any point in time in the past, down to the exact second. Flashback mode even lets you open files, copy revisions, revert changes, and rollback any folder or file back to what it was. We consider this transformative capability to be the first step towards Poly’s role in the future — a File Harness.
What is a File Harness and why do I need one?
When we started the Poly file system in 2023, agents could barely read images, let alone PDF files or entire hard drives. Our view was that a modern, robust file system for the agentic era would require brand new technologies that no existing storage system could fit in (either cloud, local, NAS, or otherwise). Thus, we built Poly: an offline-first file browser that automatically synced, indexed, and versioned your files for instant, 0ms startup and pinpoint precise search. But what makes that into a “file harness”?
It turns out that as desktop AI tools have gotten more powerful (e.g. Claude Code, ChatGPT Work, etc.) there is an increasing need for better guardrails to ensure that the agent can work fast, reduce duplicate effort, and provide a clear paper trail of alternations it made. Poly is the uniquely perfect product to accomplish this. We think that Poly is the best possible tool for desktop intelligence. it works seamlessly with all modern desktop AI tools like Claude CoWork, VSCode, Cursor, Kiro, and more. In fact, anyone needing to work with complex file types like word docs, PDFs, videos, and other media should consider Poly a critical piece of their stack. Otherwise, you’re spending up to 20x more tokens letting the agent re-read files, search inefficiently, and make untracked changes that ultimately cost and hinder your work.
Upcoming Features & Launches
As we expand the capabilities of our desktop file harness, we’re also working on tools to make Poly the fastest, most performant sandbox file harness in the world, so that your remote agents can have light-speed access to your Poly files without causing latency or wasted compute/IO. But we continue to be just as enthusiastic and excited to make Poly the best file browser in the world’s for, well.. browsing files.