guaardvark/guaardvark

**The self-hosted AI studio.** Chat with your own files, hand tasks to agents that use a real desktop and browser, run parallel coding agents, and generate video, images, music and voice. Everything runs locally, on your own GPU.
Quick start · Features · Videos · FAQ · Full capability list · guaardvark.com
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Why Guaardvark
- **It runs on your machine.** Language models, retrieval, agents and every generator run on your own hardware, through Ollama, ComfyUI and Guaardvark's own GPU services. No cloud API keys, no per-token or per-minute fees, nothing reported home. Web access, posting and every other outbound path stay off until you switch them on or start them, and all of them are declared in one file, egress.json.
- **One install is the whole studio.** Chat and RAG, screen agents, coding swarms and a full media pipeline share one GPU through a single orchestrator, so a video render and a language model take turns instead of fighting over VRAM.
- **Your coding agent can drive it.** A built-in MCP server, fifteen agent skills and a Claude Code plugin let Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and other agents run every flow: "make a music video from this song", "film this script", "train a LoRA of this character", "swarm this refactor".
- **You approve what matters.** Nothing posts and no voice is cloned without an explicit yes from you, and fixes Guaardvark writes for its own code wait for your review. The MCP server hides desktop, shell and browser tools unless you allowlist them.
Quick start
**Linux with an NVIDIA GPU** (16 GB for video, 12 GB for the Wan 2.2 5B; chat, RAG and agents run on less, see the hardware tiers). A fresh Ubuntu desktop has no curl or git; run sudo apt install -y curl git first.
Then open **http://localhost:5173**. The script is install.sh from this repository: it clones to ~/guaardvark and runs ./start.sh, which installs everything on the first run. To read it before it runs, download it first (curl -fsSL https://guaardvark.com/install.sh -o install.sh, read it, then bash install.sh), or install by hand.
**Add it to Claude Code** (two lines, no clone):
Other ways in: Docker · macOS on Apple Silicon · the CLI from PyPI · the full install guide. The current release is in the VERSION file.
Features
- **Chat with your own files.** Local RAG on pgvector: keyword and vector search fused per query, cross-encoder reranking, source citations, and retrieval that shows the chunks and scores behind an answer. Autoresearch tunes retrieval overnight. ▶ Ep 3
- **Agents on a real desktop.** Screen agents get an Ubuntu desktop of their own, see it with a vision model, click with closed-loop targeting, and work in a real browser while you watch from any page. ▶ Ep 4
- **Parallel coding agents.** A swarm of coding agents, each in its own git worktree, merged back in dependency order. Runs on Claude Code or fully locally through Ollama.
- **MCP, both ways.** An MCP server that plugs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Zed and more with one command, and an MCP client so chat can use tools from other servers. ▶ Ep 21 · ▶ Ep 16
- **Video generation.** 13 local video models across five families (Wan 2.2, LTX, HunyuanVideo, CogVideoX, and MiniMax H3 with its own soundtrack), video LoRAs, a batch queue, frame interpolation, and one click into ComfyUI. ▶ Ep 6
- **LoRA training and consistent characters.** Train character, environment and prop LoRAs from a few reference photos on your own GPU, import LoRAs trained elsewhere, and keep the same character across images, video, music videos and Film Crew productions. Details
- **Images.** Z-Image, FLUX.1, Krea 2, SDXL and Sana Sprint (1024 stills in seconds, even on 8 GB cards) generation, photo edits by instruction, inpainting and outpainting, and 4K/8K upscaling. ▶ Ep 5
- **Music and voice.** Full songs with vocals, sound effects, three neural text-to-speech engines, consent-gated voice cloning, and hands-free voice chat. ▶ Ep 7
- **Directors.** A beat-synced music-video director, a five-role Film Crew that turns a logline into a finished video, and a built-in video editor. ▶ Ep 8 · ▶ Ep 9
- **Self-improvement.** Guaardvark tests itself, drafts fixes and stages them for your review behind a codebase lock; the System Map draws the whole codebase from its real imports. ▶ Ep 11 · ▶ Ep 14
- **Command center.** A GPU orchestrator, a plugin manager with a live VRAM budget, jobs and scheduling, schema-aware backups, and a multi-machine Interconnector. ▶ Ep 12