Penny

Your private, personalized internet companion.

Author: Jared Lockhart

Overview

Ask Penny anything and she'll search the web and text you back, always with sources.

But she's not just a question-answering bot. She pays attention. She remembers your conversations, learns what you're into, and starts sharing things she thinks you'd like on her own. She follows up on old topics when she finds something new. She gets to know you over time and her responses get more personal because of it.

Penny communicates via Signal, Discord, iOS, or a Firefox browser extension — all channels share the same conversation history. The browser extension gives her direct access to the web: she can browse pages with the full rendering engine and your session, see what you're currently looking at, and present her discoveries as a browsable feed of thought cards.

Penny is a feed only for you. Private, personal, and local.

How It Works

Conversations

When you send Penny a message, she always searches the web before responding — she never makes things up from model knowledge. A local LLM reads the search results and writes a response in her own voice: casual, calm, with sources. Penny uses the OpenAI Python SDK against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you can run her against Ollama, omlx, the OpenAI cloud, vLLM, or anything else that speaks the protocol.

Penny talks to you over Signal, Discord, an iOS client, or a Firefox sidebar extension — the same apps you already use. All channels share conversation history: ask on Signal, follow up in the browser. Quote-reply to continue a thread; she'll walk the conversation history for context.

Preferences

Penny builds a picture of what you care about. As you chat, she notices the things you bring up with interest or frustration — coffee preferences, weather complaints, hobbies you keep returning to — and files them away as likes and dislikes. A topic has to come up more than once before she takes it seriously, so an offhand comment doesn't send her down a rabbit hole.

You can also just tell her in plain language — "I'm really into dark roast coffee", "I can't stand cold weather", "forget about that one", or "what do you think I'm into?". She files these onto her likes and dislikes memory the same way, no commands to remember. These shape what she thinks about and what she shares with you.

Thinking

When Penny isn't talking to you, she thinks. She picks something you're into, searches the web, and reasons through what she finds — keeping the result as a thought she can come back to. Thoughts feed into future conversations, so when you ask her about something she's been chewing on, the context is already there.

When she finds something genuinely interesting — not a repeat of what she's shared before, and aligned with what you actually like — she sends it to you on her own. She paces herself so you don't get overwhelmed.

Memory

Penny remembers things in a few different shapes — your conversations, the pages she's read, what she's learned about you, the thoughts she's had on her own. When you ask her something, she pulls the most relevant pieces of all of that into context: a page she summarized last week, a topic you mentioned a few days ago, a thought she had this morning. Old material doesn't crowd out the new — only what's actually relevant comes along.

She can also remember things you ask her to. Tell her to keep track of restaurants you've been to, or articles to read later, and she'll start a new memory for it on the spot — no configuration, no code change.

Commands

Beyond regular conversation, Penny supports slash commands:

• /commands — list every command available in this deployment
• /profile — set your name, location, and timezone (required before chat)
• /config — view or tune runtime parameters (30+ values: scheduling intervals, notification backoff, dedup thresholds, email pagination limits, etc.)
• /mute, /unmute — silence or resume autonomous notifications Email is no longer a slash command — ask about your inbox in plain language ("did I get an email from …?", "check my email for …") and Penny drives the email tools (search_emails, read_emails, plus list_emails/list_folders/draft_email on Zoho). The tools are present only when a mailbox is configured — Fastmail via FASTMAIL_API_TOKEN, or Zoho via ZOHO_API_ID/ZOHO_API_SECRET/ZOHO_REFRESH_TOKEN.

Penny's Mind

How information flows through Penny's cognitive systems — from perception to memory to thought to action.

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