Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

So weird/cool/interesting/cyberpunk that we have stuff like this in the year of our Lord 2026:

   ├── MEMORY.md            # Long-term knowledge (auto-loaded each session)
   ├── HEARTBEAT.md         # Autonomous task queue
   ├── SOUL.md              # Personality and behavioral guidance

Say what you will, but AI really does feel like living in the future. As far as the project is concerned, pretty neat, but I'm not really sure about calling it "local-first" as it's still reliant on an `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`.

I do think that local-first will end up being the future long-term though. I built something similar last year (unreleased) also in Rust, but it was also running the model locally (you can see how slow/fast it is here[1], keeping in mind I have a 3080Ti and was running Mistral-Instruct).

I need to re-visit this project and release it, but building in the context of the OS is pretty mindblowing, so kudos to you. I think that the paradigm of how we interact with our devices will fundamentally shift in the next 5-10 years.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRrKQl0kzvQ

Can someone explain to me why this needs to connect to LLM providers like OpenAI or Anthropic? I thought it was meant to be a local GPT. Sorry if i misunderstood what this project is trying to do.

Does this mean the inference is remote and only context is local?

Made a quick bot app (OC clone). For me I just want to iMessage it - but do not want to give Full Disk rights to terminal (to read the imessage db).

Uses Mlx for local llm on apple silicon. Performance has been pretty good for a basic spec M4 mini.

Nor install the little apps that I don't know what they're doing and reading my chat history and mac system folders.

What I did was create a shortcut on my iphone to write imessages to an iCloud file, which syncs to my mac mini (quick) - and the script loop on the mini to process my messages. It works.

Wonder if others have ideas so I can iMessage the bot, im in iMessage and don't really want to use another app.

Pro tip (sorry if these comments are overdone), write your posts and docs yourself (or at least edit them).

Your docs and this post is all written by an LLM, which doesn't reflect much effort.

I am excited to see more competitors in this space. Openclaw feels like a hot mess with poor abstractions. I got bit by a race condition for the past 36 hours that skipped all of my cron jobs, as did many others before getting fixed. The CLI is also painfully slow for no reason other than it was vibe coded in typescript. And the errors messages are poor and hidden and the TUIs are broken… and the CLI has bad path conventions. All I really want is a nice way to authenticate between various APIs and then let the agent build and manage the rest of its own infrastructure.

I’m am playing with Apple Foundation Models.

Properly local too with the llama and onnx format models available! Awesome

I assume I could just adjust the toml to point to deep seek API locally hosted right?