Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

A desktop AI coworker with a memory of your work and built-in surfaces to act on it.

Rowboat indexes your work into a living knowledge graph and uses that to get work done on your machine. It includes work surfaces for collaborating with AI: email client, notes, browser, code mode, meeting note taker, and workspaces for different projects.

Download latest for Mac/Windows/Linux: Download

Demo - apps to code · Demo - knowledge graph

⭐ If you find Rowboat useful, please star the repo. It helps more people find it.

Overview

Brain

Rowboat indexes email, meetings, slack and assistant conversations into a living Obsidian-style backlinked knowledge graph.

Email

The built-in email client sorts emails into important and everything else. Rowboat automatically drafts responses for important email using all the work context.

Background agents

You can set up background agents that run on events like new email or on schedule like every day at 8am. They can connect to tools, search the web, use the browser and write code using Claude Code or Codex.

Built-in Browser

Rowboat includes a browser that lets you and assistant collaborate on web tasks. Because its isolated from your main browser, you can log in only to the accounts that want the assistant to access.

Meeting Notes

A local meeting note-taker that taps into mic & speaker, produces live transcript and summarizes the meeting in a markdown file and updates the knowledge graph.

Code Mode

Code mode lets you spin up parallel coding agents with Claude Code or Codex, and have Rowboat drive them with all the work context where needed.

Apps

You can bulild your own work surfaces inside Rowboat — they get acess to all the tools and integrations, and you can share them with other people.

Integrations

Includes one-click integrations to most popular products.

Installation

Download latest for Mac/Windows/Linux: Download