~/lab $ mechape▊
MechApe
A local, private LLM studio. No cloud, no account, no separate install.
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 model you have loaded, with live token counting, model switching mid-thought, and a health indicator that tells you the truth. If a model runs out of VRAM halfway through loading, MechApe quietly retries it on the CPU 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 / MODELSIt brings its own engine
MechApe ships its own llama.cpp runtime and starts it for you. Nothing to install first, nothing left running afterward. It checks what your graphics card actually is and picks the matching build, discrete GPU over integrated, because life is short and integrated graphics are slow.
// the full inventory
What’s in the box
Live File Knowledge
Attach files or whole folders and MechApe 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 with the model engine already inside it, checksummed at build time and never fetched behind your back. 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/MechApe.git cd MechApe && npm install && npm run desktop # Windows: double-click "Start MechApe Desktop.cmd" and walk away # The model engine ships with it. Nothing else to install.
REQUIRES: NODE.JS 18+ · A HEALTHY DISTRUST OF THE CLOUD
Code signing policy
Status: MechApe’s application to SignPath Foundation is pending. Until it is approved, released builds are unsigned and say so in their release notes.
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Team roles. Committers and reviewers: codalanguez, sole maintainer — outside pull requests are reviewed before merge. Approvers: codalanguez, approving every signing request individually.
Privacy policy. This program will not transfer any information to other networked systems unless specifically requested by the user or the person installing or operating it. Two things you can ask for do cause outbound traffic, both explicit and both off unless chosen: downloading a model from Hugging Face, and — only for chats where you deliberately picked a remote model — sending that conversation to OpenRouter under your own API key. Local chats, attachments, and the search index never leave the machine.
What is signed. MechApe’s own executable and its Windows installer. Bundled upstream components — the llama.cpp runtime and Electron’s own libraries — ship unsigned, as SignPath Foundation policy requires for code a project does not build from its own source.
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, MechApe 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.
MechApe is free, open source, and constitutionally incapable of gossiping about you.
