wisp, Running Every Day
The first release line runs every day on my own box. 30,408 photos captioned and mapped, notes, voice memos, health data, search and chat over all of it, and a phone app as the front end. The current release is wisp 0.0.6, the sixth cut of wisp on 10 October 2026, the server and a signed Android app, with the code on GitHub.
[ WHAT THE BOX DOES NOW → ] [ SET UP A BOX → ] [ WISP 0.0.6 → ]If you believe in the mission, here's what we need to make it happen. Some of this we're building, some of it we can't build alone, and all of it is listed below with enough detail to start.
> 1. WHAT THE ECOSYSTEM NEEDS
These are the missing pieces, things anyone can build. Without the critical ones, local-first stays a hobby.
Local AI Your Family Would Use
A complete AI assistant on hardware you own that someone who doesn't write code could live with day to day, with their personal data, offline, and with no subscription. Ollama runs the models, and the experience around them is the part nobody has finished.
Data Liberation Tools
Export everything you've given to Google, Apple, Facebook, banks, and health apps, then import it somewhere you control. The "download your data" options are deliberately hard to use. We need tools that parse those exports into something useful.
Serverless Backup
Back up your data across multiple locations without trusting any single company. Like BitTorrent but for keeping your stuff safe. The technology exists (erasure coding, DHT, etc.) but nothing makes it easy yet.
Cross-Device Sync Without the Cloud
Keep phone, laptop, and tablet in sync without going through someone else's servers. Syncthing does this and it's great, but it needs to be easier and work better on phones, iOS especially.
Local Photo Library
Google Photos and Apple Photos are good. A local version needs to match their search and organisation features without sending everything to the cloud. Face recognition, scene tagging, timeline views, all running locally.
Personal Knowledge Base
A system that collects everything you save, notes, emails, documents, bookmarks, and lets you search and ask questions about it. Obsidian is close, and the gap is a local model that can answer questions over all of it.
Pick the thing about cloud services that annoys you most.
Build a local version. Even a partial solution is better than nothing.
> 2. OUR CONTRIBUTION
LocalGhost is our piece of the puzzle, a privacy-first, self-hosted AI system designed to run entirely on your hardware, built around a fleet of daemons that each handle one job, from ingesting your text, images, audio and structured data, through building the memory layer, to encryption, the wipe PIN and ghost.shadowd, which exists to challenge your thinking instead of confirming it. Eleven daemons ship in wisp, and the fleet will grow as new modalities and jobs are added. Today it runs on a Debian machine of your own with an NVIDIA GPU, and the box we build is planned for specter (section 3).
The technical details live in the repo. Architecture, the vault and its PINs, what leaves the box and where it is going, all documented there.
The current release line is wisp. The daemons for notes, voice, photos and video, location, health data, search and chat run every day on the development box, and What the Box Does Now goes through each of them with what it costs. Software releases are named after ghosts, smallest first. Every 0.x release is a wisp, 1.x will be shade, and specter, phantom and poltergeist come after. The current one, wisp 0.0.6, came out on 10 October 2026, and hardware ships after the software is stable.
> 3. WHAT COMES WHEN
Releases are named after ghosts, smallest first, and the name is the line while the number is the cut. Every 0.x release is a wisp and 1.x will be shade, with specter, phantom and poltergeist after it. Everything that isn't built yet sits under the earliest line it's planned for. None of it has a date, and if a piece moves, this table and the changelog say so.
| wisp 0.0.1 to 0.0.6 OUT | What runs today. The vault with one PIN and a wipe PIN, the photo archive with captions, tags and search, the trail on the box's own map, a story for every day, memories, the chat, news and prices, health and voice notes, notifications, releases the phone deploys with a rollback, a lost phone retired by its key from the box, the weather, pulled by the box for a fixed list of places (since 0.0.3), the phone's country read from the box's own map and a server built with Go 1.27.1 (since 0.0.4), and a box set up from the release alone, the volume as a file on any drive and English Wikipedia in the box's own database (since 0.0.5), and phone certificates of two weeks the phone renews itself, the box's sources on the phone with fetches from the mirror, the news feeds kept from the app and the weather on home (since 0.0.6). |
|---|---|
| later wisps 0.x | The weather on the lock screen, a retire button on the phone's DEVICES screen, a phone enrolled again that keeps its data, an offline release key that signs beside the site key, secd's own TLS for a box reached by IP alone, the streets' build started from the app, and the decoy volume, opened by a PIN of its own. A release every few weeks. |
| shade 1.x | Two FIDO2 hardware keys for setup and recovery, and with them the first recovery path. As many duress PINs as you want, each opening its own volume or wiping the box (The Honeypot Under Your Desk). Imports of bank, fitness and other exports through ghost.tallyd's parsers. Memories rolled up into episodes. The other 27 of ghost.shadowd's detectors and its cold-read arbiter. |
| specter AFTER SHADE | The box we build and sell, the tower on the home page, with its two hardware keys in the box. |
| phantom AFTER SPECTER | Mail, a browser extension, and always-on listening that keeps audio in a RAM buffer only until it's transcribed (What the Ghost Owes the People It Overhears). |
| poltergeist THE LAST LINE | The Mist and ghost.mistd, encrypted and sharded backup spread across other people's boxes, with no central server. |
The near end of this list is in the repository's README under "Where it is going", and each release's notes list its known gaps.