Run your own AI agent, locally

▶ 30-second recap of the day

The slides

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The one idea

Most people meet AI as a chatbot: you ask, it answers, you go do the work. An agent flips that. You give it a goal, and it plans, calls tools, and reports back. It can act.

The moment software can act, the game changes. A wrong chatbot wastes your time. A wrong agent does something: it sends the email, spends the money, deletes the file. So the real question is not which model is smartest. It is what this thing is allowed to touch, who holds the keys, and what happens when it is wrong. Those are infrastructure questions.

What IronClaw is

IronClaw is an open-source Agent OS built by NEAR AI. Written in Rust, ships as one binary, runs on your own machine. Local-first and privacy-first: you can run the model locally through Ollama with no API key, and your secrets never have to touch a cloud model.

An agent in IronClaw is three things: a loop that thinks, acts, observes and repeats; tools, which are what it is allowed to call; and memory, which survives after the chat closes. The key idea: tools are permissions, not features. A tool declares what it can reach, network calls hit an allowlist only, and credentials are injected at the boundary so the tool code never sees the key. If you have granted an app access to your camera, you already understand the model.

What you can build

Everything runs free on a normal laptop. The only real floor is RAM: reliable tool calling wants roughly 24 GB. If your laptop cannot manage that, use a cheap hosted model for the thinking and keep the agent, memory and tool sandbox on your own machine. That is still the whole point.

• A morning briefing that runs before you wake up
• A campus Telegram bot with your handbook in its memory
• Automated code review on every pull request

Resources

Run it yourself