# local-first

Open-source personal AI agent for messaging apps

OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent framework that turns any LLM into an autonomous personal assistant accessible through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and Signal. Running entirely on your local machine via a Node.js gateway, it connects AI models to system tools, browsers, files, and APIs for multi-step task execution with persistent memory across sessions.

Fast, native terminal emulator

GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Zig by Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder). Native UI rendering on macOS and Linux. Supports ligatures, true color, Kitty graphics protocol, and splits/tabs. Configurable via a simple key-value file with sensible defaults. Open-source with 20K+ GitHub stars and a focus on correctness, speed, and minimal resource usage. Growing as a modern alternative to iTerm2, Alacritty, and WezTerm.

Run frontier AI models across a cluster of everyday devices

exo turns a collection of everyday devices — laptops, desktops, phones — into a unified AI compute cluster capable of running large language models that no single device could handle alone. It automatically partitions models across available hardware using dynamic model sharding, supports heterogeneous device types including Apple Silicon, NVIDIA, and AMD GPUs, and communicates over standard networking without requiring specialized interconnects.

AMD's open-source local LLM server with GPU and NPU acceleration

Lemonade is AMD's open-source local AI serving platform that runs LLMs, image generation, speech recognition, and text-to-speech directly on your hardware. Built in lightweight C++, it automatically detects and configures optimal CPU, GPU, and NPU backends. Lemonade exposes an OpenAI-compatible API so existing applications work without code changes, and ships with a desktop app for model management and testing. Supports GGUF, ONNX, and SafeTensors across Windows, Linux, macOS, and Docker.

Persistent memory plugin for Claude Code with automatic context injection

Claude-Mem is a persistent memory plugin for Claude Code with 44,000+ GitHub stars that captures session context and injects it into future sessions. It features progressive disclosure with token cost visibility, automatic compression, and privacy controls with private tags to manage what gets remembered across coding sessions.

Single-file memory layer replacing complex RAG for AI agents

Memvid is an open-source single-file memory system for AI agents with 13,700+ GitHub stars. It replaces complex RAG infrastructure with instant retrieval from portable .mv2 files, claiming 35% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art on LoCoMo benchmarks with 0.025ms P50 latency. Available for Python, Node.js, Rust, and CLI.

Local open-source AI app builder running entirely on your machine

Dyad is a local-first, open-source AI app builder with 20,000+ GitHub stars that provides a Lovable and Bolt.new alternative running entirely on your machine. It supports React and Next.js frameworks, integrates with Ollama for fully offline AI generation, and works cross-platform on macOS, Windows, and Linux with both cloud and local LLM providers.

No-code knowledge base platform with visual AI workflow and built-in RAG

FastGPT is an open-source no-code AI knowledge base platform with 27,000+ GitHub stars and 500,000+ users worldwide. It combines visual workflow orchestration, built-in RAG pipelines, QA-pair extraction, and API-aligned completions into a single deployable stack that runs on just 2GB RAM via Docker one-liner deployment.

2x faster LLM fine-tuning with 70% less VRAM on a single GPU

Unsloth is an open-source framework for fine-tuning large language models up to 2x faster while using 70% less VRAM. Built with custom Triton kernels, it supports 500+ model architectures including Llama 4, Qwen 3, and DeepSeek on consumer NVIDIA GPUs. Unsloth Studio adds a no-code web UI for dataset creation, training observability, model comparison, and GGUF export for Ollama and vLLM deployment.

macOS and Linux VM runtime for AI agents on Apple Silicon

Lume is an open-source CLI for creating and managing macOS and Linux virtual machines on Apple Silicon, built specifically for AI agent sandboxing, CI/CD pipelines, and desktop automation. Using Apple's native Virtualization.Framework for near-native performance, it provides the missing isolation layer for running coding agents safely — so an accidental destructive command doesn't affect your host machine.

Knowledge graph-powered RAG framework from HKU

LightRAG is a research-backed RAG framework from Hong Kong University that combines knowledge graph structures with vector search for more contextual retrieval. Published at EMNLP 2025, it extracts entities and relationships from documents to build a structured knowledge graph, then uses dual-level retrieval across both graph and vector representations with five query modes: naive, local, global, hybrid, and mix.

Lightweight server monitoring with Docker stats and alerts

Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring platform built in Go that tracks CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, temperature, and Docker container metrics with historical data visualization and configurable alerts. Its simple hub-and-agent architecture deploys in minutes and consumes minimal resources compared to traditional monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Grafana.

Local microVM sandboxes for AI agent code execution

Microsandbox provides hardware-level isolated sandboxes for AI agents to execute code safely on local machines. Using microVMs with sub-200ms boot times, it offers stronger isolation than Docker containers while remaining lightweight enough for development workstations. OCI-compatible with support for Python and Node.js runtimes. Apache-2.0 licensed with 5,000+ GitHub stars.

Local-first AI notepad for meetings and voice notes

Hyprnote is a local-first AI notepad designed for capturing and processing meeting notes and voice recordings. It runs entirely on-device for privacy, transcribes audio using local models, and generates structured summaries, action items, and follow-ups. Built with Rust and Tauri for native desktop performance. Over 8,000 GitHub stars with strong privacy-focused community adoption.

Open-source AI second brain with deep research and RAG

Khoj is an open-source personal AI app that serves as a self-hostable second brain. It connects to your documents — PDFs, Markdown, Notion, Word — and uses RAG to answer questions grounded in your knowledge base. Supports any local or cloud LLM including Llama, Claude, GPT, and Gemini. Features custom agents, scheduled automations, deep research mode, semantic search, and Obsidian, Emacs, and WhatsApp integrations. Over 33,000 GitHub stars, YC-backed.

Self-hosted AI platform with ChatGPT-like interface for local and cloud LLMs.

Extensible, self-hosted AI platform with 290M+ Docker pulls and 124K+ GitHub stars. Supports Ollama, OpenAI-compatible APIs, and any Chat Completions backend. Features built-in RAG, multi-user RBAC, voice/video calls, Python function workspace, model builder, and web browsing. Runs entirely offline with enterprise features including SSO and audit logging.

Run local LLMs with an intuitive desktop GUI and OpenAI-compatible API server.

Free desktop application by Element Labs for discovering, downloading, and running open-source LLMs locally. Features a curated Hugging Face model browser, side-by-side model comparison, parameter tuning, and an OpenAI-compatible API server on localhost:1234. Powered by llama.cpp with Metal acceleration for Apple Silicon.

Run Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini agents in parallel with isolated branches

Open-source desktop app for orchestrating multiple AI coding agents simultaneously. Auto-creates git worktrees per agent and symlinks shared dependencies to prevent conflicts between parallel tasks. Designed for teams and power users who want to run several AI agents on different features or bugs at the same time, maximizing throughput while keeping each agent's changes cleanly isolated.

AI data IDE for 10x faster data work

Context-aware AI coding assistant from Sourcegraph. Reads your entire codebase to provide accurate code generation, explanations, and refactoring suggestions. Integrates with VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. Strong at answering questions about unfamiliar repositories, making it valuable for onboarding, code reviews, and navigating large enterprise codebases.

Git-friendly offline API client

Open-source API client for testing REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs as a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Postman. Stores API collections as plain files in your Git repository for easy version control and team collaboration. Features environment variables, scripting, collection runner, and a declarative syntax called Bru. Offline-first with no cloud account required. Available on macOS, Windows, and Linux. 29K+ GitHub stars and growing rapidly among developers leaving Postman.

Run LLMs locally with one command

Tool for running large language models locally on your machine with a simple CLI interface. Download and run Llama 3, Mistral, Gemma, Phi, Code Llama, and dozens of other open-source models with a single command. Features model management, GPU acceleration (NVIDIA/AMD/Apple Silicon), OpenAI-compatible API server, Modelfile for customization, and multi-model switching. Ideal for offline AI development, privacy-sensitive use cases, and local testing. 120K+ GitHub stars.

Structured generation for LLMs

Open-source LLM observability and evaluation platform. Trace every LLM call, measure quality with customizable metrics, and debug production issues with detailed request logs. Integrates with LangChain, OpenAI, and other frameworks. Gives teams visibility into AI application behavior, costs, and quality trends that are impossible to track without dedicated tooling.

AI-powered developer workflow

AI-powered developer productivity tool that captures, enriches, and organizes code snippets, links, and technical context across your workflow. Runs a local LLM on-device for privacy. Features Long-Term Memory that understands your development context across IDEs, browsers, and collaboration tools. Integrates with VS Code, JetBrains, Chrome, Obsidian, and more. AI copilot for explaining, generating, and transforming code. Cross-platform on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

AI code assistant for enterprise

AI code completion assistant that runs locally or in the cloud with a focus on privacy and enterprise security. Trains on your codebase for personalized suggestions. Supports 30+ languages across VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, and other IDEs. Features whole-line and full-function completions, natural language to code, and unit test generation. On-premise deployment option for air-gapped environments. SOC 2 certified. One of the earliest AI code assistants, now competing with Copilot and Supermaven.