How Conch works

Everything stays on your computer

Your chats, memories, skills and settings are plain files in one folder, ~/.conch. There is no Conch account and no telemetry.

Two things leave your computer, and only when you ask: what you say to the provider you chose, and what your assistant does in an app you connected. Choose the model on this computer, and not even that.

Conch itself only looks things up: every quarter of an hour (every hour for releases) it looks for a new version of itself, once a day for the programs it uses, (CONCH_UPDATE_CHECKS=off stops that), and every few minutes it reaches a few well-known addresses to tell whether you're online. Neither carries anything of yours.

The provider answers. Conch does the rest.

A provider brings a model. Conch brings everything around it: memory, skills, apps, routines, the browser. That is why they work with every provider, and why a chat can move from one to another without losing its thread.

It fixes itself

Conch is for people who don't debug. It sets itself up. When something is missing, stale or broken, it repairs it and carries on, and tells you afterwards, quietly. When it can't, you get one plain sentence and the button that fixes it.

It interrupts you for two things only: an approval that matters (spending, sending, deleting, granting trust), and what only a person can do (signing in, typing a password).

Safe by default

Out of the box, only this computer can open Conch, in a browser Conch opened itself. Other devices get in after you choose a password, over an address only your own devices can reach. Your assistant can't give itself more room: anything that grants trust takes a person. The whole story.

Go deeper

Architecture describes every part, and Decisions records why each is the way it is.