Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

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• Hacker News
• this is the first harness ive been excited to try in a while. looks pretty feature rich and suits most of my needs.
  by snootypoot
• Thanks, that's great to hear. Would love to know how it goes once you've tried it - and if anything's missing for your setup, let us know (we are active on Discord).
  by segmenta
• Another wrapper . Guys please build something real, AI cost too much $$ to just keep building things that already exist.
  by oneandonley1
• love this. will try this out.
  by danteocualesjr
• Thanks, would love your feedback after trying it.
  by segmenta
• 1. No container to constrain a off-the-rails LLM.

  2. Doesn't support generic IMAP email.

  3. Doesn't accept my STT.

  4. Doesn't accept my TTS.

  5. Doesn't accept my SearxNG/custom search engine

  by nekusar
• Fair list:

  1. True - no OS-level container today. The constraint is approval gating: consequential actions surface as a permission ask before they run (a separate supervisor LLM flags anything outside your intent). 2. True today. We'd deprioritized generic IMAP (drafts-on-thread is unreliable cross-provider), but you're the third person in this thread to raise it, so we'll scope it properly.

  3/4/5. Today: Deepgram for STT, ElevenLabs for TTS, Exa for search.

  At least for search we supported more providers earlier (e.g. Brave) and found the assistant's skills degrade when they can't lean on provider-specific capabilities, like Exa's granular search. So we trimmed and went deep on a few.

  Feel free to raise a GitHub issue with what you want us to support and we'll do our best.

  by segmenta
• Really cool, how long did something like this take to build?
  by neozino
• Super neat; will test. Initial read suggests the memory accretion continues indefinitely. Asking partially since I am still working on a personal way to deal with that as an issue:

  Any plans for a more opinionated way to handle memory ( but still within user's control )?

  edit: syntax

  by iugtmkbdfil834
• Update. It has a lot of potential ( and it did get better since I remember it from the original ShowHN ). There are pieces missing, but this may be a project to which I can happily contribute the pieces I think are missing.
  by iugtmkbdfil834
• This is neat, excited to try it. Over the last months I’ve been exclusively using Codex for non-coding tasks. It’s not bad, but there’s much to improve. This seems like a step in the right direction!
  by sizero
• Thanks! Would love to hear what you think, after you get a chance to try it.
  by segmenta
• This looks very close to what I want from AI tools: not just chat, but memory + actual work surfaces around
  by icevl
• Thanks, that's exactly the bet. Chat-heavy AI usage seems like a temporary phase.
  by segmenta
• This looks great, but let's see if I have this right ...

  The "Agent Apps" (or whatever we are calling them) from the big vendors are organized around projects/folders, and we attach apps (via plugins) to the projects.

  This appears to mae the apps (work surfaces) the primary artifact?

  by tomComb
• Yes, that's mostly right.

  Surfaces are the primary artifact for collaborating with the assistant - each one attaches an app to a workflow and gives both you and the agent a structured place to work, instead of everything flowing through chat.

  Chat is still first class, and projects/folders exist separately to organize work around it.

  by segmenta
• This is great!
  by BlocksAI
• Thanks!
  by segmenta
• I actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this!

  What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files.

  I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in.

  Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be awesome.

  Granola notes silently stopped working when they decided to encrypt the DB, interesting to see you've got your own in there now.

  Will check it out again.

  by _puk
• That is great to know!

  We heard of others pointing Claude to the knowledge graph. It made us double down on building a Claude desktop alternative, so we could couple them deeply. For instance, there are places you could provide feedback on emails to Rowboat and that goes into the knowledge graph which then improves the email handling. Something like this would be hard, if we did not control the assistant as well.

  Would love to see your context capsule format. We could definitely make it possible to describe your own format.

  Granola no longer working was what led us to build it natively.

  Welcome back. Would love your thoughts on the product.

  by segmenta
• Looks great. Is there an onboarding/xfer workflow from an existing Claude code harness?

  I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time building my wiki, feature plans, retrospectives, client overviews, meta overview, log, skills, commands and the barrier to trying a new command surface or agent is always “will I maintain my edge”.

  Or am I misunderstanding? Is it that I would just spawn windows to that existing harness and get to harvest additive features/data from rowboat on top?

  Edit - my typical approach would be to scrape out features from a tool like this to bolt onto my harness, why would I not do that here?

  by starcalleryisss
• You should be able to ask the assistant to copy over your data to its 'knowledge' folder. This is in ~/.rowboat/knowledge - you could copy it over manually too. Now Rowboat should be able to access and update it. If it's under knowledge then it auto-updates with new emails, meetings etc.

  Alternately you can point Rowboat directly to your folder by setting workspace in the assistant chat and it should be able to read and use it. It can update it as well, but you would need to explicitly ask it to do so.

  I'm happy to onboard you over a call if you'd like (you can DM me on Discord).

  by segmenta
• The growing problem with this and many other AI offerings is the asymmetry of effort.

  All of them take my notes, meeting transcripts, jira tickets, code, websites, and give me more to read.

  Then everyone else in the org is doing the same, to give me more to read. At the end of the day there is too much to read.

  AI is supposed to be reducing toil, but it's just making more.

  by ActionHank
• Have you tried having AI read it for you? /s
  by booi
• Fair point. But our goal with Rowboat is to do the opposite, to distill down only the parts you care about. For instance, you are not expected to read meeting notes, the important parts from it are added to your knowledge graph. That way next time you want to know something like 'where are we on x', you can find exactly that without having to wade through irrelevant information to get there.
  by segmenta
• How does sandboxing work for code?

  Is there a way to control the isolation myself, e.g. let it run code only in some VM that I provide?

  Edit: is there a sandbox for code?

  by thih9
• There's no app-enforced sandbox today. However, coding tasks get delegated to Claude Code or Codex using ACP.

  - Codex runs under its native OS sandbox (Seatbelt on macOS, bubblewrap on Linux) — where it's sandboxed to the selected working directory with network off. - Claude Code's sandbox is opt-in and we don't enable it yet, but we load your Claude config (~/.claude/settings.json), so if you've enabled sandboxing there it should work.

  Surfacing these options in the app UI is a small change on our side, which we'll pick up shortly.

  by ramnique
• Look really great! I'm a bit sad that the only way to connect to email is gmail. Is a generic IMAP connector on your roadmap?
  by dr_hooo
• Thanks!

  Fair - it's Gmail-only today. We've thought about generic IMAP, but it seems to have some technical gaps for how our email surface works. For instance, there's no reliable cross-provider way to pre-create drafts on a thread. So we haven't prioritized it just yet. We do plan to add Outlook support soon.

  by segmenta
• You mentioned Claude Code makes drafts. Does rowboat have a terminal area that is fully compatible with claude code? How does claude code then access my emails?
  by jayzer01