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!
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.