I built a free, BYOK AI coding agent IDE that runs fully offline on local LLMs

A developer built Forger, a free, source-available Electron IDE that bundles a file explorer, Monaco editor, AI chat, Git, and a TTY terminal into a single executable with a multi-step agent loop gated behind approval dialogs. The tool supports bring-your-own-key Gemini access as well as fully offline operation via Ollama, sending requests only to the user-configured LLM endpoint with no telemetry. The developer says it was built with AI in under three days and is released under FSL-1.1-MIT, converting to MIT two years after each release.

I built Forger , a standalone Electron app that bundles a file explorer, Monaco editor, AI chat, Git, and a real TTY terminal into one window — with an agent loop that lists, reads, searches, and edits files across multiple steps, all behind approval dialogs. Repo: https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide Setup guide: https://cuculhart.com/forger-howto.en.html https://cuculhart.com/forger-howto.en.html Not a VS Code fork, not an extension — a single exe. Why I built it Doing contract work, I kept hitting the same walls: - Confidential code can't go to vendor clouds. In contract work you handle code and engineering knowledge that simply may not pass through someone else's servers. - Orgs that can't approve $20/mo subscriptions. There are still plenty of organizations where a monthly AI IDE subscription is a hard sell. - VS Code extension agents get tangled. Extensions are convenient, but they also collide with each other — Copilot interference being the usual suspect. - Unapproved rewrites are a review burden. When the AI silently rewrites code, the human reviewer pays the cognitive cost. So every write, diff edit, and command goes through an approval dialog, and checkpoint/rollback undoes only the AI's changes. - Docker-in-Docker tools are heavy. Nice, but a hard setup for beginners. I wanted a single exe that just runs. - Beginners need visible panes. Explorer, editor, console, and AI chat as separate, obvious panes is simply easier to learn. Nothing matched all of this — so I built it, with AI, in under 3 days. Features - Free + BYOK — bring your own Gemini API key, pay Google directly for what you use. No subscription, no markup. - Fully offline option — point it at Ollama Gemma, Qwen, ... and every request goes to localhost only. Your code never leaves the machine. - No telemetry — the only network calls go to the LLM endpoint you configure. Source-available, so you can verify that yourself. - Human-in-the-loop — writes are confined to the project root; file creation, diff edits, and shell commands all require approval. - LiteLLM proxy support — real API keys never sit on the client. - Token-efficient context — the AI gets the file tree and fetches contents on demand via // GREP: / // READ FILE: commands. - Cheap by default — Gemini 3.8 Flash is at introductory pricing half the standard rate through the end of 2026, and even cheaper models like 3.5 Flash-Lite are selectable. Tech stack Electron / React / TypeScript / Monaco Editor / Gemini API & Ollama / Vite License FSL-1.1-MIT source-available . Free to use, modify, fork, and redistribute for any non-competing purpose — including commercial work inside your company. The one restriction: you can't sell it or a renamed clone as a competing product. Each release automatically converts to MIT two years after publication. Honest limitations It's chat/agent-centric no inline completions , there's no codebase index tree + on-demand reads instead , editor tabs don't exist yet, and it's Windows-first with the UI in English/Japanese. Roadmap Considering PDF/image recognition, making the agent loop more reliable on small local models, and chat improvements multiple chat tabs . Feedback and bug reports welcome via GitHub Issues https://github.com/cuculhart/forger-ide/issues .