u/PilgrimOfHaqq

I built a harness for myself. It runs on my own machine. Its beautiful, fast, and built for professional work (I use it for my job).

The aesthetics and design was important to me, had to be easy to use, informative, feature rich but not bloated.

Features I built into it:

• Runs locally in a browser: remote-accessible from any device with a browser, full mobile UI, installable as a home-screen app in Android.
• Tabs: Multiple sessions open at once, and sessions keep running even if I close the browser
• Prebuilt AGENTS.md per project type: Coding, Writing, Business, Legal, General
• Epic mode: Projects too big for one conversation get a persistent spec, task list, and state that future sessions pick up
• Persistent memory: browse, edit, or delete every memory, and see exactly what got recalled into any chat
• Nightly worker agents: Automated nightly code review + fixer agents lay out verified, one-click fixes every morning
• Private web search & deep research: Self-hosted search engine, cited reports (Crawl4AI).
• Independent reviewer agent: A clean-context critique of code, docs, or writing, instead of the model grading its own work
• Chats & projects: Quick chats each get an isolated folder with full tool access; serious work lives in project workspaces
• Handles every file type, both ways: Reads and authors PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, charts; plus skills and saved prompts with fill-in variables
• Voice both ways: Local Whisper dictation and read-aloud replies; no audio leaves the machine

Nice touches: full system terminal access, a ⌘K command palette with cross-project search, a usage dashboard that counts every token, live system status, a real note-taking app, plan mode, light/dark themes, native notifications when a turn finishes, and hourly encrypted backups.

My goal with this post is to inspire others to build their own harness for themselves, its actually tons of fun! Like building out your workshop or garage the way you want to help you create, repair, & experiment on things.

Why Post this?

I want to show a non-coding use case for Pi for others to take ideas from.

Why do this?

I wanted out of the big-3 chat apps. My conversations, prompts, files, and workflow all lived in their interfaces. Switching providers meant starting over.

So:

• Found Pi → discovered pi-web
• Started extending it, using the system to build itself
• It's now different enough that I gave it its own name: Sayl

I'm not a programmer. 

I understand specs, system prompts, agents.md, context management, etc. but the AI wrote basically all of it. There's surely slop in the code, but it runs on my laptop at home and it's been my daily driver ever since.

It goes wherever I go.

• Any device with a browser — full mobile view, installable as a phone app
• My PC's filesystem, reachable from anywhere
• Close the tab mid-task — sessions live in a daemon, the agent keeps working

It's built for general AI work — brainstorming, writing, research, digging into ideas — but it codes too (it built itself).

What's in it:

• Private web search + deep research — self-hosted search, clean page extraction, live research progress and controls
• Prompt library — Markdown prompts, live preview, usage counts, one keystroke to insert
• Search — within a session, or across every conversation I've ever had
• Real file viewers — PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, Markdown with math + diagrams, images, CSV/JSON — readable from my phone
• Skills library — reusable agent skills: documents, charts, spreadsheets, and more
• Projects & sessions — groups, folders, pins, archive; the AI even names sessions itself
• Embedded terminal + git, right in the browser
• Context Guard — oversized tool output captured to disk instead of flooding the chat
• Usage dashboard — token/context breakdown, search/fetch counters
• Notifications — native OS alerts when a long task finishes, phone included
• Clean-context reviewer — an independent AI reviewer for finished work (code, docs, writing, analysis)
• Hourly encrypted cloud backups

Security: localhost-only bind, reached through an authenticated tunnel. No open ports.

Not public — just showing what's possible when you point Pi at itself.

Happy to answer questions.