Sovereign Brain A local AI second brain
that runs on your machine.
Sovereign Brain is a private, offline AI assistant for your ideas — a self-hosted second brain powered by a local LLM. You talk; it captures and organizes everything into plain Markdown files that live on your disk. No cloud. No subscription. No one reading your thoughts but you.
Watch a real session
A real terminal session onboarding on my laptop, played back at 2×.
100% private
Runs fully offline on local inference. Nothing is sent to any server, ever.
Plain Markdown
Every note is a .md file you own — open it in Obsidian, VS Code, or any editor.
Agent-driven
Just talk. The agent summarizes and files key ideas, so capture is frictionless.
Free & open
Public-domain template. No lock-in, no account. Fork it and make it yours.
How your local AI second brain works
You dump
Thoughts, ideas, TODOs — throw them in freely. The agent automatically organizes the information into simple Markdown files.
Brainstorm together
You and the agent work through problems together, leveraging your existing context to develop real plans.
You execute
You know what to work on — the minimum work required for maximum return — and can quickly iterate.
What's inside the template
A clean, ready-to-run structure your AI agent already knows how to use.
sovereign-brain/ ├── AGENTS.md # how your AI agent reads + grows the brain ├── references/ # who the agent is + what it's for │ ├── purpose.md │ └── personality.md └── workspace/ # your living knowledge ├── daily-thoughts.md ├── todo-upcoming.md ├── new-project-ideas.md ├── project-history.md ├── projects/ └── sessions/ # summarized brainstorms, dated
What you'll need
Sovereign Brain runs a real language model locally, so it's built for people who want full privacy and own capable hardware.
llama.cpp plus an open model - Qwen3.6-35B-A3Bpi agent.NEW TO LOCAL AI? SEE HOW IT WORKS ABOVE, OR THE BLOG FOR SETUP GUIDES.
Common questions
Is my data private?
Yes — it runs offline on your machine, nothing is uploaded to any server.
Does it cost anything?
No. The template is free and released into the public domain.
Can I use my own editor?
Yes — it's plain Markdown, so Obsidian, VS Code, and any editor work.
How is it different from ChatGPT or Notion AI?
Those run in the cloud on a subscription. Sovereign Brain runs locally, keeps data on your disk, works offline, and costs nothing.
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