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Ada

Your AI, growing in your garden

Local-first Privacy by default Commons forever CC0 Licensed

🌿 Why Tend Your Own Garden?

Essential AI capabilities — memory, search, tools, custom behavior — shouldn't require subscriptions or cloud services. These are utilities, not premium features. They belong in the commons, running on hardware you control.

Ada gives you these capabilities, free and open, running locally on models you choose. Your conversations stay private. Your data stays yours. No rent, no surveillance, no lock-in.

Not a product. A tool you control. Built for autonomy, not extraction.

🌻 What Grows Here

🧠 Long-term memory — Semantic search over all your conversations. Ada remembers context across sessions.
🔌 Web search & tools — DuckDuckGo integration, Wikipedia lookups, custom specialists you build.
👁️ Vision capabilities — OCR text extraction from images, video frame analysis.
🛠️ Bidirectional tool use — LLM can request specialists mid-response. More flexible than traditional function calling.
📝 Custom personality — Edit persona.md, restart. Ada reflects your values.
📡 Multiple interfaces — CLI, Web UI, Matrix bot, MCP (editor integration). All first-class.
⚡ Streaming responses — Real-time token delivery. No waiting for complete responses.

🌱 Planting Instructions

Quick Start

# Install (Nix handles Python 3.13 automatically) nix develop # Get Ollama + pull a model ollama pull deepseek-r1:14b # Run Ada ada run # Chat via CLI ada-cli "What's Python?" # Or open web UI open http://localhost:5000

That's it. Ada's brain runs at http://localhost:8000

📖 Full Setup Guide ⚡ Zero to Ada (<10 min) 🖥️ Hardware Guide

🌾 The Soil (Philosophy)

Ada is built on these principles:

  1. Always free and open source — No paywalls, ever
  2. Privacy by default — Your data stays on your machine
  3. Local-first — No cloud dependencies after initial model pull
  4. Hackable — Readable code, simple architecture, documented patterns
  5. No lock-in — Standard formats, easy to migrate or self-host

"Neither clean hands nor pure hearts" — We work with what exists, toward the world we want. The models are trained. The question is: who gets to use them, and on what terms?

🌸 Join the Commons

Ada is CC0 licensed — truly public domain. Your contributions join the commons forever.

📚 Full Documentation 💻 GitHub 🔧 Build Extensions 🔌 API Reference

Named after Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who wrote the first computer program and imagined machines that could create art and music - not just calculate.