AI & Machine Learning
askTheodor — a local-first AI workforce for companies of one
A desktop app that staffs a one-person company with AI workers for sales, ops, research and content. Theodor, the chief of staff, splits the work, hands it to specialists and reports back; nothing leaves the machine without your approval. It started in 2024 as a web chat with eight AI agents, and relaunched on 17 July 2026 as a native app for macOS and Windows.
Tauri 2 Rust Tokio Axum SQLite (sqlx) React TypeScript Vite Zustand Three.js MCP Ollama Anthropic OpenAI Gemini RAG
Key Features
- AI workers from 95 professions, each with its own persona, remit, tool allowlist, voice and long-term memory
- Theodor, the chief of staff, turns a big request into a plan (a DAG of tasks), routes each task to the right worker and summarises the result
- Agents prepare, humans approve: an approvals queue, a risk gate, a kill switch and a full audit log
- Local-first: prompts, files, embeddings and credentials stay on your disk; bring your own keys for Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini, or run offline with Ollama
- Companies (per client or project), each with its own Library and RAG index; workers cite their sources
- Overnight work with routines and a daily digest of what shipped
- Real ops tools: persistent processes, SSH/SCP deploys, spreadsheet and PDF parsing, code search
- Fleet: deploy headless askTheodor instances to your own servers over SSH, running 24/7 and reporting back
- Voice chat and read-aloud with a voice per worker; a kiosk mode turns it into a multilingual touch-screen receptionist
- 116 task templates plus guided playbooks for launching a business
Challenges Overcome
- Rebuilding a cloud chat product as a native desktop app without losing the Theodor persona people knew from v1
- Keeping everything local-first while still letting users pick any cloud model, or none at all
- Making delegation trustworthy: every hop between workers is logged, budgeted and can be paused
- Scheduling plans as dependency graphs, with retries, that keep running while the laptop owner sleeps
- An approval gate strict enough that nothing goes out without a yes, but light enough not to slow the day down
- Earlier on: real-time streaming chat across several agents, token billing, and Stripe + PayPal payments in four languages (v1)
Results & Impact
Launched 17 July 2026 as a desktop app for macOS and Windows; v0.9.279 on the website as of September 2026
Simple pricing: 7-day free trial with no card, then one plan with every feature at €12/month or €120/year; add-ons for kiosks and remote instances
Rust workspace of 10 crates (agent core, memory, MCP client and server, LLM providers, licensing and more) behind a React front end
A done-for-you setup and training service for teams that don't have time to evaluate it
History, v1 (2024–2025): a web chat platform with 8 specialised agents (Theodor, CodeCraft, TaskMaster, WordSmith, SalesGuru, MarketMaster, EduMentor, BizPro) in English, German, Greek and Turkish, built with React, Vite, Supabase, the OpenAI API, Stripe and PayPal, on Free, €30 and €60 plans
History, v2 (2025): a rebuild on Next.js, AWS Amplify and LangChain, with the first MCP experiments that led to the current design
Theodor himself is the thread through every version: the chief of staff today is the first agent from 2024
"askTheodor began as a chatbot with a few clever personas. It became the team I wished I had while running a company of one: workers that remember, delegate and report back, on my own machine, and never send anything without my yes."