Software engineer by the merciless light of day, author by the mischievous glow of moonlight — and every so often, the two shifts collide and something crawls off the workbench. Today it’s official: MONKII, my local, private LLM studio for Ollama, is out in the world. Free. Open source. Constitutionally incapable of gossiping about you.
You can tour the full exhibit on the MONKII page, or go straight to the source at github.com/codalanguez/Monkii.
So what is it?
MONKII is everything I wanted from the big cloud chat apps, running entirely on my own machine. It sits on top of Ollama — the tool that runs large language models locally — and wraps it in an actual studio:
- Projects. Bundle instructions, knowledge files, skills, and conversations into their own drawers, each with its own model memory. The novel research never has to meet the tax questions.
- Skills. Reusable instruction sets in the Claude SKILL.md format — write your own, import them, or have the AI draft one for you. Toggle per project, or summon one mid-message with a slash.
- Live file knowledge. Attach files or entire folders and MONKII reads them fresh from disk every time. Edit the file; the next message already knows.
- On-device retrieval. Big attachments get indexed with local embeddings — about ten times faster than dumping the whole file into context, and better at finding the fact you actually asked about.
- Seven themes. Four dark, three light, all WCAG AA. Your 2 a.m. self will thank you.
- A desktop app. A native Electron shell that starts Ollama for you and manages your folders, or run it in the browser if you prefer.
Why local?
Because your conversations are nobody else’s business — and MONKII takes that literally. Out of the box, nothing ever leaves your machine. Not the chats, not the files, not the embeddings. The app binds to loopback only, with DNS-rebinding and CSRF protections standing guard at the door. The only cloud involved is the one outside your window.
If you write fiction, you already know why this matters. Drafts are fragile, embarrassing, occasionally incriminating things. Mine involve enough morally ambiguous protagonists and questionable search histories that I’d simply rather not mail them to a data center. Now the first reader of every terrible first draft is a model running two feet from my coffee.
The honest part
Sometimes local hardware taps out — so MONKII has optional OpenRouter support for remote models. It is strictly opt-in, every remote conversation is loudly badged, costs are visible, and your retrieval embeddings still stay home. Privacy software that hides its own data flows isn’t privacy software; it’s marketing. MONKII shows its work.
Quick start
Three commands. No account. No email field lurking at the end. You’ll need Node.js 18+ and Ollama installed.
git clone https://github.com/codalanguez/Monkii.git
cd Monkii && npm install && npm startOn Windows, double-click Start Monkii.cmd and walk away. For the desktop app, it’s npm run desktop.
And there’s a Lab now
MONKII is the first resident of The Lab — a new corner of this site for the software that escapes my workbench. It shares the shelf with Haunted Tech, the open-source WordPress theme currently possessing the page you’re reading. Everything in the Lab is free, open source, and slightly haunted.
Kick the tires, file an issue, fork it, teach it new tricks. And if you build a skill worth bragging about, tell me — the Lab door stays unlocked.
