love this. will try this out.
Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#12Really cool, how long did something like this take to build?
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#13love this. will try this out.
Thanks, would love your feedback after trying it.
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#14This looks great, but let's see if I have this right ... The "Agent Apps" (or whatever we are calling them) from the big vendors are organized around projects/folders, and we attach apps (via plugins) to the projects. This appears to mae the apps (work surfaces) the primary artifact?
Yes, that's mostly right.
Surfaces are the primary artifact for collaborating with the assistant - each one attaches an app to a workflow and gives both you and the agent a structured place to work, instead of everything flowing through chat.
Chat is still first class, and projects/folders exist separately to organize work around it.
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#15Really cool, how long did something like this take to build?
[dead]
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#16I actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this!
What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files.
I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in.
Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be awesome.
Granola notes silently stopped working when they decided to encrypt the DB, interesting to see you've got your own in there now.
Will check it out again.
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#17I actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this! What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files. I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in. Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be a…
That is great to know!
We heard of others pointing Claude to the knowledge graph. It made us double down on building a Claude desktop alternative, so we could couple them deeply. For instance, there are places you could provide feedback on emails to Rowboat and that goes into the knowledge graph which then improves the email handling. Something like this would be hard, if we did not control the assistant as well.
Would love to see your context capsule format. We could definitely make it possible to describe your own format.
Granola no longer working was what led us to build it natively.
Welcome back. Would love your thoughts on the product.
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#18Looks great. Is there an onboarding/xfer workflow from an existing Claude code harness?
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time building my wiki, feature plans, retrospectives, client overviews, meta overview, log, skills, commands and the barrier to trying a new command surface or agent is always “will I maintain my edge”.
Or am I misunderstanding? Is it that I would just spawn windows to that existing harness and get to harvest additive features/data from rowboat on top?
Edit - my typical approach would be to scrape out features from a tool like this to bolt onto my harness, why would I not do that here?
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#19Looks great. Is there an onboarding/xfer workflow from an existing Claude code harness? I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time building my wiki, feature plans, retrospectives, client overviews, meta overview, log, skills, commands and the barrier to trying a new command surface or agent is always “will I maintain my edge”. Or am I misunderstanding? Is it that I would just spawn windows to that existing harness and ge…
You should be able to ask the assistant to copy over your data to its 'knowledge' folder. This is in ~/.rowboat/knowledge - you could copy it over manually too. Now Rowboat should be able to access and update it. If it's under knowledge then it auto-updates with new emails, meetings etc.
Alternately you can point Rowboat directly to your folder by setting workspace in the assistant chat and it should be able to read and use it. It can update it as well, but you would need to explicitly ask it to do so.
I'm happy to onboard you over a call if you'd like (you can DM me on Discord).
Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop
#20Looks great. Is there an onboarding/xfer workflow from an existing Claude code harness? I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time building my wiki, feature plans, retrospectives, client overviews, meta overview, log, skills, commands and the barrier to trying a new command surface or agent is always “will I maintain my edge”. Or am I misunderstanding? Is it that I would just spawn windows to that existing harness and ge…
You should be able to ask the assistant to copy over your data to its 'knowledge' folder. This is in ~/.rowboat/knowledge - you could copy it over manually too. Now Rowboat should be able to access and update it. If it's under knowledge then it auto-updates with new emails, meetings etc. Alternately you can point Rowboat directly to your folder by setting workspace in the assistant chat and it should be able to read…
That's fair and you can do that. We built Rowboat with the principle that the whole should be better than the sum of the parts - the email client, notetaker, and surfaces all write back into one knowledge graph, which then improves each of them. So it's much better if you use Rowboat end to end.