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Christopher Studva
Christopher Studva

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I built JARVIS — a local-first AI assistant you actually own (macOS + Linux, MIT)

#ai #privacy #python #opensource

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are thin clients. The intelligence lives on
someone else's servers, every word you say leaves your house, and the moment
the vendor has an outage — or you're on a plane — they mostly stop working.

I wanted the JARVIS I was promised: always on, genuinely helpful, and mine.
So I built one — Jarvis CLS — and open-sourced it (MIT).

The idea: you own the whole stack

  • 🧠 Your brain. Run a private local model (Ollama / llama.cpp), your own server, or a frontier cloud API — with health-aware failover between them.
  • 🗣️ Your voice. Swappable TTS profiles you can change mid-sentence.
  • 💾 Your data. Every note, embedding, and audit line lives on your disk under ~/.jarvis — exportable and clearable.
  • ✈️ Works offline. Local speech-to-text (faster-whisper), local voices (piper/pyttsx3), and a model chain that always ends in an on-device fallback. Unplug the internet and it keeps talking.

No account. No forced cloud. No fixed voice. No "sorry, I can't reach the
server right now."

What it actually does

  • 43 permission-tiered skills — every elevated tier is off until you turn it on, with a local audit log.
  • Proactive, not just reactive — an ambient agent that speaks first on real triggers ("Battery is at 18%… I'd recommend saving your open work").
  • Decomposes messy requests — say one sentence, it plans and executes the steps.
  • Extensible via MCP — add any Model Context Protocol tool server; still permission-gated and audited.
  • Runs natively on macOS and Linux (X11 or Wayland).
  • Picks how it addresses you on first run — a preset or your own name.

It's ~16,000 lines, 646 passing tests, ruff- + mypy-clean (enforced in CI),
and hardened across five rounds of adversarial security review.

Try it

macOS

cd jarvis-unstoppable && brew install portaudio && make setup && make run
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Linux

cd jarvis-unstoppable && bash scripts/install_linux.sh && make setup && scripts/dev_run.sh
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Leave the API keys blank to run fully local/offline, or add them for a cloud brain.

Why open-source it?

Because an assistant that listens to everything you say should be one you can
read the source of. It's MIT, source-available, and self-hostable. If that's the
kind of assistant you've wanted, a ⭐ helps others find it — and I'd love to hear
what you'd build on top of it.

Repo: https://github.com/reapersapprentice/Jarvis-CLS

— C.Studva

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