Hey devs, Ishant here 👋
You might've seen me build Cogent, my autonomous agent for Godot. Around that same stretch I was quietly building something a lot bigger: an agent for my entire PC.
That's Hearth, and I've spent the last 5 months on it.
Easiest way to describe it: Claude Code meets LM Studio, but for your entire PC and fully local. An AI that actually operates your computer instead of sitting in a chat tab describing what it would do if it could.
And yeah, its default name is JARVIS. That's the whole fantasy, right? You talk to it, hand it a task, and it goes and does it on your real machine. The voice genuinely feels like talking to JARVIS. Rename it to anything you want and pick from a dozen built-in voices, but let's be honest, half of us just wanted JARVIS to be real.
This is the biggest thing I've made and the one I genuinely took seriously. Here is what it is.
🎲 What it does
I got my first real GPU a few months back, started running local models, and kept hitting the same wall: they just talk. Closed source, can't check the web, can't open a file, stuck in a box.
So I gave one web search. Then file access. Then the shell. And it grew into something that:
📂 reads and edits your files, runs commands
🖥️ opens your apps and controls the desktop (it reads real button names off the accessibility tree, not guessing at pixels, so it doesn't fat-finger the wrong thing)
🌐 drives a real browser tab you watch it click through
👀 sees your screen
🎙️ talks and listens with a wake word, fully offline, in a voice you pick (a dozen to choose from)
📱 you can run it from your phone over Telegram, Discord or WhatsApp: "grab the invoice off my desktop" and it finds the file and sends it back
🧠 remembers you across sessions (plain markdown it writes for itself)
🛠️ 100+ tools, builds PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets, and generates images and video
Basically: if it's a thing you do on your PC, it's probably in there.
🔒 "And now your files are gone"
That was everyone's first joke. It's also exactly why the hard part of these 5 months was the safety, not the features.
Here's the part people assume is missing: its file writes, deletes and moves are hard-confined to a workspace folder. Point it at C:, System32, anywhere else, and the code refuses the write with a permission error unless you've explicitly handed it that folder. Not "it promises not to," the write literally gets blocked.
And the one path that can reach outside that, a raw shell command, is permission-gated. You see the exact command and approve it before it runs:
1 yes · 2 no · 3 always · 4 never (or just type what you'd rather it do)
Plus a loop guard that stops runaway tool chains (because watching an agent confidently fail the same thing 14 times changes you 😭), and a live log of every tool call as it runs. Nothing destructive happens without you seeing exactly what it is and saying yes.
🔧 The parts I'm proud of
- Point it at any OpenAI-compatible model (LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp) or a cloud key
- The Full edition bundles its own GPU server and downloads plus runs models for you. Lite is for when you already run your own. Started on Lite? Run Full over it and your stuff stays.
- A built-in model browser tells you "fits / tight / too big" against your real VRAM before you download. You never leave the app.
- It carries ~100 tools but only loads the few it needs per message, so the prompt stays lean even on a 9B.
- MCP server AND client. Already on OpenClaw or Hermes? One click copies your memory and skills over, and it only copies, so your old setup stays untouched.
- Full C drive? Move the whole thing (memory, chats, models) to another drive with one button.
Windows has a one-click installer. Linux runs from source (I tested it), I just don't own a Mac.
🧩 It keeps growing (this is the fun part)
Skills. A skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md that teaches Hearth a workflow. Install one someone else wrote with a single line, /skill install owner/repo, or paste a GitHub link in chat. There's a community index (awesome-hearth-skills) filling up, and you publish your own by pushing a folder to GitHub. The model only sees a one-line summary of each and loads the full steps when it actually uses one, so you can install dozens without bloating the prompt. PDFs, decks, spreadsheets and diagrams ship as built-in skills.
It writes its own tools. Hit a capability gap and Hearth writes a plugin for itself mid-conversation, validates it, and uses it that same turn. Drop any .py in the plugins folder and it auto-loads too.
Teams. Ask for a team ("one frontend, one backend, one architect") and Hearth spawns each as a sub-agent and opens a live terminal pane per agent, so you watch them plan, call tools and finish side by side.
Media. Image and video generation is built in, and if you run Stable Diffusion locally it drives Forge and juggles your VRAM so image-gen and your chat model don't fight over the GPU or if you are going with API then if the cloud provider supports image or video generation Hearth will handle the rest on Cloud too.
😅 Why tho?
Because the smartest AI on earth lives in someone else's cloud, forgets you the moment the tab closes, and the meter never stops.
I wanted one that lives on MY machine, remembers me, does real things, and never phones home. So I spent five months building it, and I use it every day.
Launching solo with no audience is rough (HN flagged my post for being a fresh account, r/LocalLLaMA won't let me post yet), but I didn't build this for a leaderboard. I built it because I wanted it to exist.
It's MIT, completely free, and I'm 18 now (turned around 10 days ago, so this is kind of a birthday project for you'll and myself 🎂).
👉 Link to it: https://github.com/0pen-Sourcer/hearth
👉 a ⭐ genuinely helps it get found (they're free, and my repo looks a little lonely rn 😭)
If you switched off cloud assistants to a local one that could actually touch your machine, what's the first thing you'd make it do?
Drop it below 👇 I might just build it. Or it might already be there.
Go check it out!
-Ishant 🖤
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