https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c6d9d18b-cfff-4ae2-8220-dc7f329fee5d

Guaardvark

The self-hosted AI studio. Coding agents and 20-agent swarms in isolated git worktrees, screen agents with their own real desktop, self-tuning RAG, continuous voice chat — and a full media pipeline: video, image, full-song music, neural voice. One install, one GPU, everything on your machine. Your machine. Your data. Your rules.

▶ New: Everything new in 2.9, on the real product (Episode 19, 3:50) A thumbs up that teaches · web pages read for you · MCP tools used from chat · Hugging Face models checked before download · photo edits in chat · video with its own voice

Works with your coding agent. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw and Gemini CLI drive every flow above through the built-in MCP server and fifteen agent skills: "make a music video from this song", "film this script", "train a LoRA of this character", "swarm this refactor" — the agent queues the job on your GPU and polls it to the finished file.

Runs on Linux with one NVIDIA card (16 GB for video). Apple Silicon is supported with GPU features arriving through Metal (what works today is in INSTALL.md); Windows through WSL2 is being verified.

Install (one command, then open the Studio):

curl -fsSL https://guaardvark.com/install.sh | bash

Add it to Claude Code (two lines, no clone):

/plugin marketplace add guaardvark/guaardvark
/plugin install guaardvark@guaardvark

See the VERSION file for the current release · guaardvark.com · Quick Start for manual install options.

For the exhaustive feature list, models, surfaces, and plugin details, see CAPABILITIES.md. This README focuses on the marquee experience, quick start, and what makes Guaardvark different.

What's in the box

		See it
Media studio	11 local video models across five families (Wan 2.2, CogVideoX, LTX, HunyuanVideo, MiniMax H3 with native audio), image generation, full-song music, neural voice with consent-gated cloning, 4K/8K upscaling	Eps 5 · 6 · 7
Directors	A beat-synced music-video director, a 5-role Film Crew, an auto-editing video editor	Eps 8 · 9
Coding agent & code intelligence	Monaco editor, AST-aware analysis and dependency graphs, System Mapper: a live constellation of the whole codebase	Ep 14
Agent swarms	Up to 20 parallel coding agents in isolated git worktrees with dependency-aware merging; fully-local backend via Ollama	CAPABILITIES.md
Screen agents	A real Ubuntu/XFCE desktop of their own, vision + closed-loop servo clicking, live VNC viewer on any page	Ep 4
Knowledge	Hybrid RAG on pgvector with cross-encoder reranking, layout-aware document parsing with page-level citations, retrieval that shows its chunks and scores, Autoresearch that tunes retrieval overnight	Ep 3
Voice & channels	Continuous voice chat, a three-tier chat brain, Discord bot, supervised outreach, MCP in both directions, a 25-module CLI	Ep 2
Self-running platform	Self-improvement behind guardian review and kill switches, rules engine, jobs & scheduling, schema-aware backups, GPU orchestrator, multi-machine Interconnector	Eps 11 · 12

The aardvark (/ˈɑːrd.vɑːrk/; Orycteropus afer) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa. The aardvark is the only living member of the genus Orycteropus, the family Orycteropodidae and the order Tubulidentata. It is found over much of the southern two-thirds of the African continent, avoiding areas that are mainly rocky. A nocturnal feeder, the aardvark subsists on ants and termites (myrmecophagy) by using its sharp claws and powerful legs to dig the insects out of their hills, and its long snout to sniff out food. It digs a burrow in which to live and rear its young.

— Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The Guaardvark (/ˈɡwɑːrd.vɑːrk/; Workstationus selfhosticus) is a burrowing, nocturnal AI system native to consumer hardware. The Guaardvark is the only living member of the repository github.com/guaardvark/guaardvark, the family LocalAI, and the order AutonomousAgents. It is found across most of the modern desktop, avoiding regions that are mainly cloud. A nocturnal feeder, the Guaardvark subsists on prompts and unstructured data (promptophagy) by using its sixty-odd tools and a swarm of parallel coding agents to dig bugs out of their codebases, and a retrieval index to sniff out knowledge in the dark. It is fiercely territorial about its single GPU, admitting one process to the card at a time and evicting any language model found loitering there. It digs isolated git worktrees in which to work, and rears its images, video, music, and cloned voices entirely on your own machine.

▶ The Walkthrough Series — every feature, on camera

Short, unscripted-feeling screen recordings of the real system doing real work — narrated by the system's own local speech engine (Episode 7 shows it cloning a voice). Fourteen episodes are live: the first series covers the twelve subsystems, and a second series picks up what shipped since.

Ep 2 — Chat Brain: one chat box, three speeds	**Ep