Abigail - Your Personal AI Family Companion

The private coordinator that manages your family's personal AI Entities.

Abigail is the smart, private manager that lives in your home. You, the mentor or family head, create and customize individual Entities - each one a unique AI companion tailored to a person or purpose.

Your family talks directly to these Entities. Abigail coordinates everything behind the scenes: memory, skills, security, and growth. Every install also provisions an immortal local coordinator identity called Abigail Hive that owns the shared memory.db, stays visible while an Entity is open, and centralizes provider/model management for the whole home. That Hive-owned store now runs on embedded SurrealDB, giving Abigail one local-first memory substrate for document records, graph links, semantic archives, and queue state without requiring Docker or an external database.

Why Families Love Abigail

• Complete privacy - everything stays on your computer. No accounts with big tech companies.
• One shared local memory core - Abigail Hive owns a single embedded SurrealDB store for shared coordination, memory, archives, and queue state.
• Real power when you want it - connect any Entity to the strongest cloud models with one click. You are never locked to one provider.
• Hive-owned model control - provider and model changes happen in Abigail Hive, not inside each individual Entity chat.
• Grows with your family - teach Entities new skills, memories, and preferences over time.
• Simple for everyone - kids, parents, and partners just chat naturally while you control the advanced settings.
• Handles real-world sites safely - for authenticated flows like webmail, Abigail uses Browser skill fallback instead of fragile IMAP/SMTP plumbing.

Quick Start (5 minutes)

1. Download and run the Windows installer
2. Launch Abigail from the installed app icon
3. Create your first Entity in Abigail Hive
4. Configure local or cloud models in the Hive sidebar if you want extra capability
5. Let your family chat with the selected Entity while the Hive stays open beside it

No accounts. No data sharing. Just your family and the Entities you control.

Current Dev Note

• Abigail is still in a dev-first phase. A clean working dev instance matters more than cross-version compatibility right now.
• Legacy migration and upgrade preservation are not current product promises. Remove or replace stale compatibility paths when they get in the way of the active Hive-first design.
• The implementation uses two desktop app roots: Abigail Hive for control-plane/admin work and Abigail Entity Runtime for chat/runtime work. The family-facing installer must still expose one Abigail app icon and start the internal pieces automatically.
• Default local builds and installer validation are intentionally unsigned and updater-free during stabilization. Final OV signing happens later on the dedicated release-signing system.
• Repeatable release automation is documented in docs/RELEASE_RUNBOOK.md. The active full installer release lane currently builds the Windows one-step installer; Apple/macOS builds are temporarily removed from the matrix.
• UI and UX work must follow the Abigail design system in docs/design/README.md.

Dev Start

• From the repo root, start the desktop app with cargo tauri dev.
• If you only need the Hive frontend shell, run npm run dev in hive-app/src-ui.
• If you only need the Entity Runtime frontend shell, run npm run dev in entity-runtime-app/src-ui.
• The Tauri watcher now ignores frontend dependency churn through .taurignore, so Vite temp files should not retrigger Rust rebuilds during normal dev.
• On Windows machines with Application Control enabled, cargo build and cargo tauri dev can still fail with os error 4551 when Cargo tries to execute generated build-script binaries. That is an OS policy blocker, not an Abigail source-code failure. Use a build-allowed environment to launch the desktop shell in that case.

Split Stack Local Dev

• Use pwsh ./scripts/dev/launch_split_stack.ps1 to build and launch the Hive daemon, Entity Runtime daemon, and the split desktop shells from one command.
• Use pwsh ./scripts/stage_split_installer_resources.ps1 when validating the Windows installer payload locally; it stages the internal split binaries that the family installer bundles behind the single Abigail app icon.
• Those scripts standardize CARGO_TARGET_DIR to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Abigail\cargo-target on Windows so allow-listing can target one stable developer build path instead of repo-local target\....
• If Windows policy still blocks desktop-shell builds, run pwsh ./scripts/diagnose_windows_build_policy.ps1 for a JSON diagnostic summary and use pwsh ./scripts/dev/launch_split_stack.ps1 to fall back to the browser harness automatically.
• The browser fallback lives at dev-harness/ and is served by node ./scripts/dev/run_browser_harness.mjs; it talks directly to the local Hive and Runtime daemon APIs.
• Session details, pids, and logs are written to target/manual-test/stability-reset/session.json. Shut them down with pwsh ./scripts/dev/stop_split_stack.ps1.

Local Memory Model

• Abigail Hive owns the shared persistence root and opens the local memory.db store before user-facing Entities start.
• Shared orchestration state lives in the abigail/hive Surreal namespace/database pair.
• Per-Entity state is isolated into abigail/entity_<uuid> databases inside the same local store.
• Research-era SQLite artifacts such as abigail_seed.db, abigail_memory.db, jobs.db, calendar.db, and kb.db are legacy-only and should not be treated as active runtime stores.
• Browser, mentor-monitor, Id, Superego, and memory enrichment flows stay out-of-band so the family chat path remains responsive.

For the Curious: Where Abigail Came From

Abigail began as part of a larger research vision for trustworthy, decentralized AI. We took the best parts of that vision and made them simple, safe, and useful for real families.

See documents/DECENTRALIZED_TRUST_PAPER_ALIGNMENT.md.