Jean
Create with any AI, keep everything.
Ask in words or with a file, and Jean hands back what you asked for, made: an answer with its sources, a document, a spreadsheet, a chart. It works with GPT, Claude, Gemini or an AI on your own computer, and it is made for people who will never open a terminal. There is nothing to install and no Jean server: everything Jean keeps lives in your browser as plain files, and the thinking happens on your device or with a provider you choose. Free and open source.
Open Jean at jean.is · Help · Why Jean exists
Jean in a minute, played by Jean itself. Watch it with sound, in your language.
What Jean does
- Reads your files: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV and text, and pictures for brains that can see.
- Does the maths instead of guessing: calculations run as real code, in JavaScript, Python or bash, in a sandbox inside the tab, never on your machine.
- Hands back files you can use: Word documents, spreadsheets, decks, charts, pictures and short films, seen beside the conversation and saved with a click.
- Works on your folders where they are: it finds, reads and changes files in place, shows you each change first, and undoes it if you ask.
- Follows you from one computer to another, through a folder in OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive or Google Drive.
- Remembers, if you want it to: what it should know about you, standing instructions, projects, and skills it learns from requests you repeat.
- Reaches your services and the web, each source a numbered citation.
- Repeats on a schedule: a routine is a request Jean sends itself every hour, day or week, or once later.
- Takes on bigger tasks: helpers work on a task's parts at once, and Double-check compares each cited claim with its source.
- Speaks your language, one of 46, right to left included.
- Listens and speaks: dictation, read-aloud and live conversation, with speech recognised on your device.
- Asks first: by default before sending, sharing, deleting or anything external, and it never touches passwords or payments. You choose Do it, Ask me first or Never for each kind of action.
Jean starts as a single box and offers each of these when you need it, like a game that teaches itself. docs/product.md describes every feature.
Private by design
- Your data stays on your device, as plain files in the browser's private file system, one file per thing. A backup is one zip you keep wherever you like; your keys are encrypted on the device and never part of it.
- You choose the brain:
- On this device: Gemma 4 E2B on WebGPU, about 3.1 GB, downloaded once if you agree, and offered only where it can run.
- In one click: sign in with OpenRouter.
- Your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible service, or a local server such as Ollama or LM Studio.
- A plan you already pay for: Claude Pro or Max through Claude Code, ChatGPT Plus or Pro, or Copilot through Copilot CLI, each reached through This computer.
- Auto picks one for each request, with Intuition, a small helper on the device, once it is on: the cheapest brain that can do the job, and the device's own for personal content or while you are offline. A switch keeps everything off the cloud.
- Each answer says where it was done: how long it took, what it cost, which brains answered, and whether anything left your device, with a certificate that holds none of your words.
- Code a brain writes never runs in the page, but in a sandboxed worker with an opaque origin and no network. The page has a strict Content Security Policy with Trusted Types.
Good to know
- Your data lives in this browser, at the address you opened Jean from. Clearing the site's data clears Jean's too, so keep a backup, or a synced folder.
- Folders and syncing need Chrome or Edge. Elsewhere Jean works on a copy of a folder, and you save what changed.
- Routines run while Jean is open. What fell due while it was closed runs when you are back.
- Browsers: Chrome or Edge 108, Safari 16.4 or Firefox 114, or later. The brain on this device also needs WebGPU with
shader-f16, on a computer rather than a phone or a tablet.
Small on purpose
There is no build step: Jean is plain ES modules and an import map, with JSDoc types checked by tsc. Three libraries load up front, @preact/signals-core, lit-html and marked; everything else, QuickJS, Pyodide and Transformers.js included, loads when a capability is turned on. Every limit, on lines of code, the first load's size and the base prompt among them, is in budgets.json: CI fails when one is over, and npm run budgets prints where each stands.
Jean speaks standards rather than inventing its own: the OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic Messages APIs for brains, MCP for connections, Agent Skills (SKILL.md) for skills, ACP session/update events for its activity, the Decisions API for Intuition, and Intl and the Web Platform for everything else.
Run it yourself
With Node 22 or later:
npm install
npm run dev
Then open http://127.0.0.1:4173 and pick a brain. To try Jean without any account, start the fake brain the tests use, and connect it under On your computer → Other at http://127.0.0.1:4174/v1:
node test/fixtures/fake-brain.js
- Host your own copy:
npm ci && npm run build:web, then serve dist/web/ over HTTPS from an address that won't change. deploy/ has the headers and a recipe for each host.
- Reach services that refuse a browser, such as Google Workspace or Slack, through the gateway.
- Build the desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux with
npm run build:desktop: a window of the system's own web view, made with Neutralino, which needs WebKitGTK on Linux (how it works).
- Use Jean in your editor:
npx jean-cli acp in any editor that speaks ACP, such as Zed, on the folder Sync keeps (~/Jean unless --folder names another) (cli/).
Contributing
Read AGENTS.md before writing code: it holds the rules every change follows, from the budgets to the security, data and UI rules, and every command. Before you push:
npm run check
It builds, type-checks, runs the tests and checks the budgets. npm run e2e runs the browser tests in Chromium and WebKit against the fake brain (first, once: npx playwright install chromium webkit). CI runs both on every push and pull request, and GitLab's the first.
app/ holds everything a deploy serves; the root holds what never ships: jean-cli, the gateway, the desktop and container builds, the scripts, the tests and the docs.
Bugs and questions go in issues. Report a vulnerability privately, as SECURITY.md says.
Documentation
| Document | What's in it |
|---|
| MANIFESTO.md | Why Jean exists, in one page |
| docs/product.md | The user, the vocabulary, progressive discovery, and how every feature behaves |
| docs/architecture.md | Stack, data, security, brains, languages, events |
| docs/design.md | Jean's identity, Tilde, its wave, and the themes |
| docs/enterprise.md | Policy, gateways, what is open and what is enterprise, and what the architecture allows later |
| docs/trust/ | For an organisation's IT, security and privacy teams: the threat model, signed releases, a DPIA template, how accessibility is checked |
| deploy/ | Hosting a copy of Jean: the headers, the types, and a recipe for each host |
| docs/gateway.md | Running the gateway, and what each service needs |
| cli/ | jean-cli: Jean in an editor, and the gateway from npm |
| docs/reels.md | Jean's videos of itself: the reels made and to make, the player, the score and the export |
| , , |
License
Jean is open source under the MIT license. The enterprise integrations in app/ee/ are under the Elastic License 2.0 and need a key. An additional grant makes them MIT if keys can't be bought for twelve months (D139).
