Rowboat - Open-source local-first AI coworker with memory
Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
Rowboat is an open-source, local-first desktop AI coworker that transforms your workflow by indexing emails, meetings, and Slack conversations into a living knowledge graph. Unlike tools that reconstruct context on demand, Rowboat maintains long-lived memory in plain Markdown, allowing you to inspect and edit your data. It features built-in work surfaces for email, code, and web tasks, supports background agents for automation, and integrates with local or hosted models like Ollama and Claude Code. Designed for privacy and control, it runs entirely on your machine across Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The result is memory that compounds, rather than retrieval that starts cold every time.
- piratebroadcast
Rowboat markets itself as "local-first," but if you look in the actual codebase, transcription is Deepgram cloud, voice is ElevenLabs, analytics is PostHog, and the LLM is a cloud API.
- dannyobrien
What I'm looking for right now is a tool like this that lets more than one person participate in the conversation: right now Claude Code and similar tools are great for working alone, but I'd like to effectively pair-prompt with a partner who can see what's happening, and take turns steering the conversation.
Can Rowboat do this? If not, does anybody know a harness that can?
- starcalleryisss
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?
- ActionHank
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.
- dr_hooo
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?