A personal AI assistant that evolves with you.
It learns how you work, remembers what matters, and acts before you ask. Yours to name, shape, and extend.

What it does

Area	Summary
Memory	Learns what matters and forgets what doesn't. Structured memory items — identity, preferences, projects, events — extracted with source attribution and deduplication. Hybrid retrieval (dense + sparse) ranks results semantically and lexically, with staleness windows per memory type. Per-user and per-channel isolation. Embeddings run locally by default.
Identity	Becomes its own. Behavior lives in SOUL.md, and during onboarding the assistant observes how you communicate and writes its own personality files. A per-user journal captures its reflections on past interactions. NOW.md acts as an ephemeral scratchpad for current focus and active threads.
Proactivity	Reaches out when something matters, without being asked. Every hour it checks in with itself: re-reads its notes, notices what's unfinished or due soon, and sends a message if needed. Notifications are routed to the right channel and won't interrupt you if you're already talking.
Security	Fail-closed by design. Actor identity is resolved once (guardian, trusted, or unknown) and enforced everywhere. Untrusted actors cannot read or write memory, trigger tools, or escalate. Credentials live in a separate process and never reach the model. Every tool runs in a sandbox.

Memory, identity, proactivity, and security in the Vellum Assistant

Get started

1. Download the latest release

2. Open the app and pick your mode

Managed — sign in via Vellum Cloud, no local runtime required
Local — everything runs on your machine

3. Hatch your assistant

Give it a name, a personality, and the keys to your work

_{Prefer the terminal? See CLI install below.}

Quick demo

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/009bd0ae-95ac-4cf3-81bc-d54cd8631583

CLI

Install and common commands

The CLI works but the desktop app is our primary focus. Available for advanced users, contributors, and non-macOS environments.

Install

bun install -g vellum
vellum hatch

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant.git
cd vellum-assistant
./setup.sh
source ~/.bashrc
vellum hatch

Common commands

vellum wake        # start services
vellum sleep       # stop services, keep data
vellum client      # interact through the terminal
vellum ps          # view running assistants
vellum terminal    # open a shell into a managed assistant container
vellum upgrade     # upgrade to latest version

All commands target the default assistant. If you have multiple, pass the assistant ID as the second argument.

Infra and security

Area	Summary
Trust engine	Decides who can do what, and defaults to no. Fail-closed trust system that resolves actor identity once (guardian, trusted, or unknown) and enforces it everywhere. Untrusted actors cannot read or write memory, trigger tools, or escalate. Your credentials live in a separate process and never reach the model.
Skills	Add new capabilities through sandboxed plugins. Manifest-driven plugins (SKILL.md + TOOLS.json) that inject tools and prompt sections at runtime. Skills can be bundled, installed from a catalog, or added from the workspace.
Channels	One assistant, everywhere you need it. Use it from the macOS app, Telegram, or Slack, with shared memory across all of them. More channels coming soon.
Multi-provider support	Swap models without changing anything else. Supports Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Ollama for local models. Embeddings follow the same pattern: local ONNX by default, with automatic fallback to cloud providers.

Foundational documents

The canonical sources for who we are and how we talk about what we're building. The docs site at vellum.ai/docs is a rendered view of these files.

Doc	What it is
Constitution	Who we are, what we believe, and what we refuse to compromise on
Glossary	The shared vocabulary we use to talk about personal intelligence

Documentation

Section	What's covered
Architecture	Platform domains, repo structure, runtime · clients · gateway
Security & Permissions	Sandbox, credentials, trust rules, permission modes
Features & Capabilities	Integrations, dynamic skills, browser, attachments, media embeds
API & Communication	SSE event stream, event payloads, remote access
Development Workflow	Claude Code commands, parallel PRs, review loops, release pipeline

📖 Full documentation →

Contributing

We welcome contributions from everyone.

Development: The contributing guide will help you get started.
Make sure to check out our Code of Conduct.

Community

💬 Discord
🐛 Issues

License

MIT — see License. Integration logos from Simple Icons, licensed CC0 1.0.

Vellum Assistant is open-source software built by Vellum AI, a for-profit company. We also offer a managed product, the Vellum Platform, which sustains the business. Free to use and modify under MIT, and we're committed to keeping it that way.

Built with 💚 by Vellum