Instrument

A calm, powerful, private AI workspace, perfectly at home on your computer.

---

Instrument is an AI workspace that runs privately on your computer. It has a built-in browser, works with your local files, and runs its own tools to complete complex, multi-step tasks rather than just answering questions.

• Complete challenging multi-step tasks with AI
• Create and edit documents, slides, spreadsheets, and reports
• Browse and act on the web with an onboard AI agent
• Every task saves as a local folder you own, versioned automatically

Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, or local models.

---

Support and feedback

Reports and requests start as discussions, not issues. Please pick the matching category, because only Issue Triage asks for the details a bug needs.

• Something broken? Open an Issue Triage discussion.
• Want a feature, or have an idea? Open a Feature Requests, Ideas discussion.
• Question, or need help with setup? Open a Q&A discussion.
• Security vulnerability? Email security@tryinstrument.com rather than filing publicly. See SECURITY.md.

The issue tracker holds work we have accepted; discussions get promoted to issues once they reach an actionable conclusion. CONTRIBUTING.md has the full routing and what makes a report actionable.

---

Setup for development

Prerequisites: .agents/setup.md. Environment variables: .agents/env.md.

pnpm install
./scripts/setup.sh
pnpm run dev:studio

Dependencies

pnpm-workspace.yaml

• @types/node is pinned to an exact version in the catalog: to avoid constant pnpm dedupe --check failures.
• better-sqlite3 is ignored in pnpm-workspace.yaml to avoid the native dependency installation because we are using Node's native SQLite support.
• @mongodb-js/zstd and node-liblzma are ignored because they are native addons pulled in by just-bash's tar command for zstd/xz support; tar works without them via fallback.
• @electron/rebuild>node-abi is overridden to 4.31.0. electron-builder 26.8.2 resolves node-abi 4.24.0, which predates Electron 42 and cannot map its ABI, so @electron/rebuild fails. The override is scoped to @electron/rebuild so nothing else is affected.
• just-bash@3.4.1 is patched with changes we carry ahead of upstream releases (see patches/just-bash@3.4.1.patch). The patch is generated, not hand-edited: pnpm scripts:rebuild-just-bash-patch rebuilds it from the sources named in patches/just-bash-sources/. Everything we patch or work around in just-bash, and what has to be true before each can go, is registered in docs/architecture/just-bash-upstream.md.
• @parcel/watcher@2.6.0 is patched to delete its binding.gyp (see patches/@parcel__watcher@2.6.0.patch). At runtime the loader requires the prebuilt per-platform package (@parcel/watcher-${platform}-${arch}, all listed as explicit deps) first and only falls back to a source-compiled ./build/Release/watcher.node, which we never use. With npmRebuild: true, @electron/rebuild sees binding.gyp and compiles that unused fallback against Electron's ABI (wasted work, and a cross-compile failure risk). Removing binding.gyp makes @electron/rebuild skip just this package while still rebuilding every other native addon. electron-builder has no per-module rebuild exclusion (excludeReBuildModules PR #9097 was closed unmerged), so the patch is the supported path; revisit if that lands.