nick-baumann/gobby

GOBBY is a personal AI assistant designed to run around the clock on a Mac Mini M4, Apple's small desktop computer. It stays always on, can be reached from several messaging apps at once, and acts as one consistent assistant across all of them, sharing a single memory of your conversations no matter which app you use. The idea behind the project is that a Mac Mini M4 is cheap enough to leave running twenty four hours a day, costing roughly twelve dollars a year in electricity, quiet enough to sit on a desk without a fan, and powerful enough to handle the AI reasoning GOBBY needs. Rather than trying to run on every kind of computer, GOBBY commits fully to this one piece of hardware, which lets it plug directly into macOS features: login credentials are stored in the macOS Keychain, the built in secure password manager, the assistant starts automatically using macOS's own background process supervisor so it survives restarts and sleep, and camera, microphone, and screen access follow Apple's standard permission prompts rather than a custom system. You can talk to GOBBY through WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, a web chat page, or voice, and every one of these connects to the same underlying conversation, so a chat started on one app can continue on another without losing context. New abilities, called skills, are added simply by placing a folder containing a SKILL.md file into a directory, and the running assistant picks it up immediately, with no restart required. All of the actual AI reasoning is handled by OpenAI's Codex command line tool running underneath. The project is released under the MIT license. The full README is longer than what was provided.