A personal assistant built around an always-on Rust daemon, terminal and web clients, branching conversations, durable memory, and replaceable providers. Development happens directly in a project-bound session; independent work runs as jobs.
One person's daily driver, built in the open. Current phase: 4, voice + remote. Web/mobile is deployed; voice and backup/restore remain unfinished. No releases, stability promises, or multi-user plan.
- Design — architectural authority and crate layout.
- Web client — implemented interactions, deployment, and acceptance checks.
- Providers — configuration and dated measurements.
- Testing — focused runs, logs, rendered frames.
The TUI and arc-web use the same binary protobuf protocol. The Svelte/TypeScript web client runs in desktop browsers and as a phone PWA. It supports conversations, streaming replies and tools, cancellation and steering across clients, jobs, project/model/thinking controls, and saved drafts. arcd owns sessions, models, tools, jobs, and memory.
See web development for setup, tailnet HTTPS deployment, and remaining acceptance checks. Installed-iPhone keyboard/lifecycle and long-session performance still need real-device testing. Voice is not a prerequisite.
The Nix development shell supplies Rust, protoc, Node 24, Buf, librsvg, and build tools. Local inference additionally needs llama-server and a GGUF; hosted-only configuration starts no sidecar.
nix develop
just build
# Configure data/arc.toml before starting:
target/debug/arcd run --config data/arc.toml
target/debug/arc # another terminalWithout --config, arcd prefers ~/.config/arc/arc.toml, then data/arc.toml. Missing configuration uses local defaults. For local inference, set llama.model_file to your GGUF; just model downloads the default under ~/.local/state/arc/models/, not the checkout.
Runtime state follows data_dir: checkout default data/, installed convention ~/.local/state/arc/. just install builds release binaries, installs the user service, and restarts it; run it after active turns/jobs finish. just install-service only installs the unit.
Checks: just test, just fmt, just lint.
For the web client, in the same shell:
cd arc-web
npm ci
npm run devFrom the repository root, just web-build, just web-test, just web-test-browser, just web-proto, and just web-deploy run frontend commands. Web deployment publishes static files only; it does not restart arcd.
The daemon reports its Perfetto trace path at startup, under the data directory's traces/. Open it in Perfetto or query it from the development shell:
trace_processor_shell path/to/arc.pftrace
> select name, dur/1e6 as ms from slice order by dur desc limit 10;Spans cover model calls, tools, memory, and jobs. RUST_LOG filters trace and stderr output. Traces are disposable and excluded from backups.
MIT.