October 2026
This post first appeared on the Kowalski blog. It's written for people who have never heard of Kowalski, so let's start at the beginning.
Kowalski is a small team of AI agents that lives on your own computer and does chores for you. Not a chatbot you have to keep talking to, and not a platform you have to administer. You hand it a job, it does the job, and you get a file back. It's open source (MIT), written in Rust, and it runs on a free local model through Ollama, or on any hosted model with your own key.
There are two well-known open-source projects in the same neighbourhood, and they help to explain what Kowalski is by what it isn't. OpenClaw is a personal assistant you chat with: it gets wide access to your machine and your apps, and it works best with a big frontier model behind it. Paperclip goes one level up: it runs a whole "company" of paid coding agents, with org charts, budgets and approvals. Both are impressive. Kowalski makes the opposite bet. Each job is a small, fixed pipeline you can read. The agents only touch the one folder you give them, and they ask before doing anything risky. The hard parts (fetching pages, running SQL, building spreadsheets) are ordinary code, so a small free model on a laptop is enough. The result is cheaper (€0 a run on a local model), more private (nothing leaves your machine), and easier to trust (every number comes from a query, not from the model's imagination). Penguins: no lobsters, no corporation.
So what do you actually give it? A chore: a question about a spreadsheet, the five pages you read every morning, a document that just landed in your inbox, a topic to research. Kowalski hands the chore to a horde, a short pipeline of specialised agents we call penguins, and gives you back something you can use: a report workbook, a one-page brief, a note in your Obsidian vault.
Five hordes come with it:h
A horde is a folder of plain Markdown files, so you can read exactly what each penguin is told, copy one and change it, or have kowalski build a new one with you.
Kowalski started on 4 March 2025 as a weekend experiment: a Rust program that could talk to a local Ollama model. Here's the short version of what happened next.
Eighteen months and more than 700 commits later, the pattern is clear: almost every good change removed something. The long version of that story is Eighteen months of Kowalski.
People with recurring chores and data they'd rather keep on their own machine: a small business owner with a sales workbook, an engineer who reads the same five sites every morning, a researcher whose notes live in Obsidian. If you write code, a horde is a folder you can version, review and share.
On a Mac, download Kowalski.dmg, drag it to Applications and open it. On a Mac or Linux, from a terminal:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yarenty/kowalski/main/install.sh | bash
kowalski
Your browser opens on Setup: pick a model, a folder, and optionally your tableski account. Then pick a horde and send it in. Everything is at github.com/yarenty/kowalski.
If something goes wrong, open an issue. Kowalski does the analysis; I do the apologising. And if everything works first time, just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave. 🐧
Originally published on the Kowalski blog.