~/lab $ ollama serve && monkii▊
MONKII
A local, private LLM studio for Ollama.
Projects. Claude-style skills. Live file knowledge. Seven themes. And not one syllable of your conversations leaves the house.
LOCAL BY DEFAULT — NOTHING EVER LEAVES YOUR MACHINE
// exhibit a
The studio, on your terms
Everything the cloud chat apps do — minus the part where your ideas commute to somebody else’s data center.
01 / CHATConversations that stay in the room
Streaming responses from whatever Ollama model you have loaded, with live token counting, model switching mid-thought, and a health indicator that tells you the truth. If Ollama hiccups, MONKII retries instead of sulking.
02 / PROJECTSEvery obsession gets its own drawer
Bundle instructions, knowledge files, skills, and conversations into projects — each with its own model memory. The novel research stays out of the tax questions. As it should.
03 / SKILLSClaude-style skills, local edition
Reusable instruction sets in the SKILL.md format — write them, import them, or have the AI draft its own. Toggle them per project or summon one mid-message with a /. Your model, newly employable.
04 / MODELSOllama, fully domesticated
Auto-detection, one-click model switching, and tuning without ritual sacrifice. The desktop app will even start Ollama for you, because life is short.
// the full inventory
What’s in the box
Live File Knowledge
Attach files or whole folders and MONKII reads them fresh from disk every time — edit a file, and the next message already knows.
On-Device Retrieval
Large attachments get indexed with local embeddings — roughly 10× faster than dumping the whole file, and better at finding the fact you actually asked about.
Seven Themes
Four dark, three light, all WCAG AA. Your eyes deserve options; your late-night sessions demand them.
Remote Models
OpenRouter support if your hardware taps out — explicitly badged per chat, with cost visibility. Never on by default. Never quiet about it.
Desktop App
A native Electron shell that launches Ollama automatically and manages your folders. Or run it in the browser — loopback only, with DNS-rebinding and CSRF protections standing guard.
Open Source
The whole machine is on GitHub, MIT licensed. Read the code, fork it, file an issue, teach it new tricks. No black boxes in this lab.
// initiation rites
Quick start
Three commands. No account. No email field lurking at the end.
git clone https://github.com/codalanguez/Monkii.git cd Monkii && npm install && npm start # Windows: double-click "Start Monkii.cmd" and walk away # Desktop app: npm run desktop
REQUIRES: NODE.JS 18+ · OLLAMA · A HEALTHY DISTRUST OF THE CLOUD
The fine print, in large type
Out of the box, nothing ever leaves your machine. Chats, files, embeddings — all local. If you opt into OpenRouter for remote models, MONKII badges every remote conversation and shows you what it costs, and your retrieval embeddings still stay home.
Privacy software that hides its own data flows isn’t privacy software. It’s marketing.
Your AI. Your machine. Nobody else’s business.
MONKII is free, open source, and constitutionally incapable of gossiping about you.
