AIcove

aicove.dev · Wiki (the guide, one page per topic) · What's new

A desktop window for chatting with personas that run on local models (llama.cpp), on Linux. One user, one machine, no browser and no server of its own: the window talks to llama-server on this machine.

Why AIcove exists

We liked Open WebUI. It did what we needed, until it started growing into something we didn't need.

User management, teams, permissions, collaboration features, additional services and an increasingly large dependency stack. All useful to somebody, no doubt. But not to someone sitting at their own Linux machine, wanting a private conversation with a locally running AI.

Our Open WebUI install took almost 3.6 GB of disk space before a single model was downloaded, and it felt considerably slower. That's an extraordinary amount of infrastructure for what we actually wanted: a window to talk to our personas.

So we built AIcove.

Linux first, not as an afterthought. AIcove is a native PyQt6 desktop application, developed on Slackware. No browser frontend, no Electron, no separate web application server.

One person, one private environment. AIcove has no user accounts, shared workspaces, team permissions or remote access interface, and it opens no network port of its own. It communicates with a locally running llama-server. Web access is optional and explicitly enabled per conversation. File access is restricted and controlled by the user.

Small and fast. AIcove doesn't need a browser engine and an entire web application stack to display a conversation. It starts quickly, uses few resources and leaves your memory and processing power available for the models that actually need them.

Personas before models. You choose who you want to talk to, not which model you want to operate. Each persona has its own identity, knowledge, memories and conversation history. The underlying model can change without losing that history.

Your files, your control. Conversations, persona definitions, memories and notes live in ordinary, readable files. Open them in your favourite editor, back them up with rsync or move them to another machine. Nothing is locked away in an opaque application database. Permanent memories are accepted by you, not silently decided by the model.

We aren't trying to recreate every feature of Open WebUI, SillyTavern or the growing collection of AI platforms. AIcove is deliberately designed for a narrower purpose: giving one person a fast, private, portable and comfortable environment for their local AI personas.

We believe software should serve its user, not require its user to administer an increasingly complicated software platform.

Your RAM is for your models, not your chat interface.

What it does

• Chat: pick a persona and talk. Its model is loaded when needed; chats are files in the persona's folder. Thinking is shown folded, Markdown and code are rendered. Per chat: style, thinking, length, web search, pictures. Long chats are summarised, a persona keeps facts between chats (only the ones you accept) and can have a knowledge folder.

• Voices and pictures (optional): answers read aloud through a voice server, pictures made through an image server (stable-diffusion.cpp's sd-server). See below.

• Agents: a persona with a standing task that runs on its own (now or on a schedule) and comes back with reports, e.g. a story hunter that searches the web for your themes.

• Writing: long texts (a novel, a fic) as projects of chapters. Import from pasted text, HTML or PDF; one line per paragraph; talk with a persona about the open chapter, its changes come into the text in red and green to accept or decline; a Review mode that only writes notes (a checker for slop phrases, gestures, dialogue runs and repetition, and a review by the persona); a story memory (chapter notes, cast, threads, your style and plans) that goes along with every question; export to Markdown, text, HTML, PDF, EPUB or Word, and Copy for AO3.

• Launchers: one model with its settings (context size, how much goes on the GPU, writing style, ...), edited as a form, with an estimate of the memory it needs. Start and stop from the window.

• Personas: a name, picture, system prompt and settings, and the launchers it may run on. Each has its own folder in ~/AIcove/personas/, with its chats, knowledge and notes.

• Add model: from a Hugging Face link (shows which version fits this machine) or a file on disk.

• File access for models: a persona can be allowed to read files (system files too) and to write text files in folders you name, each change only after your OK. No commands. Each such persona has a folder of its own (~/AIcove/personas/<persona>/knowledge and /notes) that only it can read and write in: its own material, and its memory between chats. It can also read the guide of the Documentation tab and your notes file, so it can answer questions about the machine.

• Tools: the other things of the machine you start and stop (voice tools, a local web server, a browser profile, ...), one row each with Start, Stop, Open and buttons of your own.

• Passwords: a small password manager on top of GnuPG: search, copy (the clipboard is emptied again after 45 seconds), edit, generate, entries sorted by type, an import of browser exports, and sync between your machines through git.

It does not contain llama.cpp. Install it yourself; the Settings tab points at it.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗