I’ve run into a Hazel problem where it won’t work on files on the desktop. I’ve gone to the Hazel forums, and it’s been a long time since there was any real active discussions there. Even here it’s been a year I think since anyone discussed it.
So, is Hazel headed off into the sunset? Or maybe it’s working so well people don’t need to look for help. 
Not that I know of. Does Hazel’s log file give any hints to what might be the problem?
I’ve been using Hazel for years, and it continues to work well for me. I consider it a mature product that does its job well, so maybe there’s not as much to talk about as there was in the early days of Hazel.
At some point, I could see supplementing or replacing Hazel with AI tools; I’ve experimented with using Claude for renaming files, and the results were impressive, albeit not perfect. Or, maybe Hazel will gain some AI functionality in the future (just a guess…not based on any insider knowledge) so that it can create rules based on AI prompts (e.g. “File documents similar to this one in folder x. Group them by year and rename the documents as yyyy-mm-dd - Bank Statement based on when the statement was issued”).
Last update I received was February 17, less than a month ago. So certainly not dead. Sometimes it doesn’t fire on certain folders, but I’ve found the old “turn it off and on again” fix works. Seems to be some sluggishness problem with Tahoe, not Hazel.
Hazel support has worked for me on the very few times I’ve needed it. Hazel has been used here every day for over a decade now.
it’s been a long time since there was any real active discussions there.
I’ve had similar experience where either my posts weren’t responded to. Or the responses were very concise not solving my problem. In those cases I gave up and use Alfred to create automations for those use cases.
I think it’s a solo-dev creating that product and maybe it’s not their full time job - i’m just speculating here. Because I’ve not seen much engagement from them in any forum (reddit, discord, their own forum etc)
That said, I think the product is still very reliable and it does stuff for me daily. They also released hazel 6 a few months back as well.
Are you syncing your desktop with iCloud?
I read somewhere about a similar problem where shortcuts weren’t working on files on the Desktop but Turning off syncing of the desktop made them work again.
If this works, either save your files initially to somewhere that doesn’t sync using iCloud, or turn off syncing of the desktop folder.
I really hoped that the newest major version of Hazel would incorporate AI to help identify and rename files. When they released a new major version that didn’t do this, I vibe coded something that would.
I still use Hazel because it’s much faster than this, but anything Hazel can’t identify then gets sorted by this tool.
It uses a local multimodal LLM to review both scanned and downloaded documents, using both OCR and AI vision to determine what they are. It’s perfect for the things Hazel can’t file like greeting cards, photos and artwork, miscellaneous one-offs that don’t match specific rules, etc. I run it locally for privacy so I don’t send personal documents to OpenAI. It’s much slower than Hazel, but smarter. It’s still not perfect, but working together they handle pretty much everything pretty well.
Here’s a screenshot. You can see that it uses similar rules as Hazel, but described in plain language. The Destination folders are subfolders in my Downloads folder that match folders in my digital filing cabinet so I can review everything before moving it to the final destination.
And it also keeps a log where it shows the original filename, new filename, and a short one-sentence summary of why it decided something fits a certain category, so I can course-correct if it consistently makes the same filing mistake.
Neat. Have you programmed the course correction as training?
I’d like to see Hazel take this direction, too, with Foundation Models to keep it local and fast. But slow is fine for most Hazel-type purposes.
Very interesting
What did you use for your vibe coding?
I expect that this integration is coming, and running locally fits well with Apple’s views.
I recently tried the AI integration (running a local LLM) in DEVONthink to see how it would reveal data in a search versus DEVONthink’s own intelligence. Using the LLM was much slower by probably two or maybe three orders of magnitude. Was it any better? Frankly if it were better it wouldn’t matter because of the frustrating wait.
I think we will get there, but not this year.
I made it a while ago and I’ve played with so many vibe coding tools I’m not sure I remember. This might have actually been just straight in ChatGPT.
Local AI is severely hardware-limited and more prone to hallucinations due to comparatively tiny datasets. Consumer Macs with 16GB RAM aren’t going to do much better than 8-12B parameters (and 12B is pushing it). That’s very small.
I have had ongoing issues with Hazel and am about to delete it entirely. The problem is due to continually and rapidly changing file formats for the major task I wanted it to do, rename bank and utility statements to a standard format and moving the files to specific folders. It’s impossible to figure out how it’s selecting the date to go into the filename. The formats the banks and utilities provide change very frequently. Getting the exact date formula right is painful and sometimes even when I can not see any changes it suddenly starts selecting a different date or can’t find the date at all in the text. Every month a significant number of the 26 file renaming rules fails to work. The time it takes to debug and fix it is longer than the time it takes me to manually rename the files using NameChanger. The last 2 remaining things Hazel does that work consistently is move all screenshots to my downloads folder and move all .md files in downloads into the inbox in my Obsidian vault. Those tasks are useful but I could live without them.
I’ve had a similar experience with Hazel over the past year or so. Plus it’s often very slow doing things that used to be done almost instantly.
Thanks, everyone. I managed to figure out my problem (user-inflicted error—doh!), but I’m really glad to hear Hazel is still alive and well.
Oh yes, Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 
