I just pushed v22 of my project : a local AI companion for Radarr, that goes beyond generic genre or TMDb lists.
This isn't "yet another recommender". It's your personal taste explorer that actually gets the vibe you want in natural language and builds recommendations starting from your existing library.
Key highlights from a real recent run:
- Command:
--mood "dystopian films like Idiocracy, Gattaca or In Time" - Output: Metropolis (1927), V for Vendetta, Children of Men, Brazil (1985), Minority Report, Dark City, Equilibrium, Upgrade, The Road... → oppressive/surveillance/inequality/societal critique atmosphere, not just "dark sci-fi".
How it works :
- Starts by sampling random movies from your Radarr collection (or uses your mood/like/saga input).
- Asks a local Ollama LLM (e.g. mistral-small:22b) for 25 thematic suggestions based on atmosphere/vibe.
- Validates each via OMDb (IMDb rating, genres, plot, director, cast...).
- Scores intelligently: IMDb rating + genre match + director/actor bonus + plot embedding similarity (cosine on Ollama embeddings).
- Adds the top ones directly to Radarr (with confirmation: all / one-by-one / no).
- Persistent blacklist to avoid repeats.
Different modes :
--mood "dark psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators", any vibe you describe--like "Parasite" --mood "mind-bending class warfare"(or just--like "Whiplash")--saga(auto-detects incomplete sagas in your library and suggests missing entries) or--saga "Star Wars"--director "Kubrick"/--actor "De Niro"/--cast "Pacino De Niro"(movies where they co-star)--analyze→ full library audit + gaps (e.g. "You're missing Kurosawa classics and French New Wave")--watchlist→ import from Letterboxd/IMDb--auto→ perfect for daily cron / Task Scheduler (wake up to 10 fresh additions)
Standout features:
- 100% local + privacy-first (Ollama + free OMDb API only)
- No cloud AI, no tracking
- colored console output, logs, stats, HTML/CSV exports
- Synopsis preview before adding
- Configurable quality profile, min IMDb, availability filters
- Works on Windows, Linux, Mac
GitHub (clean single-file Python script + detailed README):
https://github.com/nikodindon/radarr-movie-recommender
If you're tired of generic Discover lists, Netflix-style randomness, or manual hunting give it a spin. The vibe/mood mode + auto saga completion really change how you expand your collection.
Let me know what you think, any weird mood examples you'd like to test, or features you'd want added!
Did you build it, though, or did Claude code it?
Built with Claude by the looks of things. Not sure if Claude was used to generate the boilerplate and whether the dev reviewed it after or whether Claude did all of it, but definitely Claude was used for some of it. I recognise the coding style that Claude outputs and the bugs that it implements that will cause TypeErrors if not handled.
FWIW, I'm not against using AI as an assistant for coding (I do it too, using Claude and Vercel as assistants) just as long as the code is reviewed and understood in full by the dev before publishing.
A very sane take. I do wish devs would fully disclose this on their github or other. That way, if the project is seasoned, well starred, et al, and the dev used AI as an assistant, then the user gets to decide. Given all the criteria are met, I would deploy it.
I will say that I have observed what seems like a pretty decent up tick in selfhosted apps, and I would be willing to bet a goodly amount of them have at the very least, used AI in some capacity, if not most/all code. I don't have any solid evidence to back that up but it just seems that way to me.
I think the problem is a cyclical one. Some devs are afraid to admit that they used AI to help them code because there's so much hatred towards using AI to code. But the hatred only grows because some devs are not disclosing that they've had help from AI to code and it seems like they're hiding something which then builds distrust. And of course, that's not helped by the influx of slop too where an AI has been used and the code has not been reviewed and understood before its released.
I don't mind more foss projects, even if they're vibe coded, but please PLEASE understand your code IN FULL before releasing it, if at least so you can help troubleshoot the bugs people experience when they happen!
Cowards. "Some devs" would not survive five minutes in the real world as a queer person.
Yeah. Maybe it's time to adopt some new rule in the selfhosted community. Mandating disclosure. Because we got several AI coded projects in the last few days or weeks.
I just want some say in what I install on my computer. And not be fooled by someone into using their software.
I mean I know why people deliberately hide it, and say "I built ..." when they didn't. Because otherwise there's an immediate shitstorm coming in. But deceiving people about the nature of the projects isn't a proper solution either. And it doesn't align well with the traditional core values of Free Software. I think a lot of value is lost if honesty (and transparency) isn't held up anymore within our community.
Warning, anecdote:
I was unexpectedly stuck in Asia for the last month (because of the impact of the war), turning an in-person dev conference I was organising into an "in-person except for me" one at a few days notice.
I needed a simple countdown timer/agenda display I could mix into the video with OBS; a simple requirement, so I tried a few from the standard package repos (
apt, snap store, that kind of thing.)None of them worked the way I wanted or at all - one of them written in Python installed about 100 goddamned dependencies (because, Python,) and then crashed because, well, Python.
So I gave up and asked my local hosted LLM model to write it for me in Rust. In less than 10 minutes I had exactly what I wanted, in a few hundred lines of Rust. And yeah, I did tidy it up and publish it to the snap store as well, because it's neat and it might help someone else.
Which is more secure? The couple of hundred lines of Rust written by my LLM, or the Python or node.js app that the developer pinky-promises was written entirely by human hand, and which downloads half the Internet as dependencies that I absolutely am not going to spend time auditing just to display a goddamned countdown clock in a terminal window?
The solution to managing untrusted code isn't asking developers for self-declared purity test results. It's sandboxing, containers, static analysis... All the stuff that you are doing already with all the code/apps you download if you're actually concerned. You are doing those things, right?
Honestly, any developer that isn't using an LLM as an assistant these days is an idiot and should be fired/shunned as such; it's got all the rational sense of "I refuse to use compilers and I hand-write my assembly code in
vi."(And I speak as someone who has a
.emacsfile that's older than most programmers alive today and finally admitted I should stop usingcshas my default shell this year.)Here's the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in. Railing against it really isn't going to change anything.
Haha. I think there's often a rough idea on what kind of programmer people are, judging by their opinion on these AI tools.
Have you tried arguing with your AI assistant for 2.5h straight about memory allocation, and why it can't just take some example code from some documentation? And it keeps doing memory allocation wrong? Scold it over and over again to use linear algebra instead of trigonometric functions which won't cut it? Have you tried connecting Claude Code to your oscilloscope and soldering iron to see what kind of mess its code produces?
I'm fairly sure there are reasons to use AI in software development. And there are also good reasons to do without AI, just use your brain and be done with it in one or two hours instead of wasting half a workday arguing and then still ending up doing it yourself 😅
I don't think these programmers are idiots. There's a lot of nuance to it. And it's not easy at all to apply AI correctly so it ends up saving you time.