A GPL-oriented stack for engineers, hackers, artists, note-hoarders, and unix wizards who want AI assistance without surrendering privacy, agency, or control.
three tools / one posture
A terminal-first cognitive shell for practitioners who want AI help without giving up operational awareness. The shell stays primary. The assistant suggests, explains, and preserves context; the human remains in control.
Open Exoshell →Auditable local-first AI coding pipelines. Agents are treated like unreliable workers inside bounded, testable workflows: propose, validate, apply, check, record, and leave artifacts for human review.
Open NightShift →Local retrieval and memory infrastructure for markdown knowledge bases. Your notes stay local. Markdown stays canonical. The database is a rebuildable cache, not a cloud-owned memory vault.
Open Glassmind →manifesto / no black boxes on the critical path
The ENG Stack is built around a simple belief: people should have the power to inspect, modify, share, and run the tools that shape their thinking. Local-first AI is not nostalgia. It is a practical defense of privacy, customization, repair, and autonomy.
This project is aligned with the free software tradition: source code matters, user freedom matters, and the right to build your own tools matters. GPL licensing keeps those freedoms downstream. If someone improves the stack, the community should be able to learn from it, fork it, repair it, and keep going.
Your data should not need to leave your machine just to become useful.
Tools should fit your workflow instead of forcing you into a product funnel.
AI agents are useful, but invisible automation is not trust.
Run it, study it, change it, share it. Keep the keys in human hands.
source available now