I built Ares — a local-first personal AI assistant that lives in your terminal (open source), by 16 year old kid
Been building this solo for a while and finally feel good sharing it: Ares, a personal AI assistant that actually remembers you, runs in your terminal (or a desktop app), and keeps everything on your machine instead of shipping your life to some company's server.
The idea was simple: I wanted something like Jarvis — not a chatbot that forgets everything the second you close the tab, but something that builds up real context about me over time and actually does things instead of just talking about them.
What it can do right now:
- 🧠 Real memory — hybrid vector + keyword search (sqlite-vec + FTS5) so it recalls facts, preferences, and past conversations, not just the last few messages
- 🛠️ ~45 tools — reads/writes files, runs shell commands and Python in persistent REPL sessions, generates and edits images, searches the web and actually reads the pages (not just snippets)
- 🌐 Browser automation via Playwright MCP — it can go click around the web for you
- 📧 Gmail + Calendar — direct OAuth, no third-party middleman services touching your inbox
- ⏰ Cron jobs — schedule it to run recurring tasks with plain English ("every weekday at 9am, summarize my inbox")
- 🎙️ Voice mode — push-to-talk or fully hands-free, local STT via faster-whisper
- 📦 Skills system — portable
SKILL.mdplaybooks it can load on demand instead of cramming everything into one giant prompt - 🔌 MCP client — plug in any Model Context Protocol server for more tools
- 💻 CLI, desktop app, and server mode — same brain, three ways to talk to it
The privacy part actually matters to me. Memories, conversations, everything — stored locally in SQLite. No telemetry. No analytics. Where most assistants reach for a convenience API layer to hook up Gmail, this one does the OAuth dance directly so nothing extra sees your data.
It's still very much a work in progress — I'm actively hardening the architecture and building out a proper task system right now — but it's genuinely usable today and I'd love feedback, contributions, or just someone else to yell at me about what's broken.
GitHub: https://github.com/akyourowngames/friday
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the memory system, or why I made specific choices — building this thing has taught me more than any tutorial ever did.