Introduction

What Ghillie is

Ghillie is a local-first control plane for AI agents. You give it a goal in plain English; it breaks the goal into tasks, sends each task to the model best suited to it, hands that model only the tools the task needs, checks the result, and remembers what mattered. Everything it learns is stored in a PostgreSQL database on your machine.

Behind the conversation it can call on Claude, Codex and local models through Ollama. You never choose between them and you never see the machinery. You talk to Ghillie.

The promise

Ghillie owns the run from start to finish:

1. Conversations and who is allowed to talk to it.
2. Task decomposition and the dependencies between tasks.
3. Model and runtime selection for each task.
4. Tool access, granted as short-lived, task-scoped leases.
5. Progress, cancellation, retry and budgets.
6. Verification and the final answer.
7. Memory and how it is retrieved.
8. The audit trail for all of the above.

The models never own the top-level run. That is what makes Ghillie safe to leave switched on.

Non-negotiable behaviours

• Every model turn, tool call, approval and state change is recorded as an audit event.
• Sending a message to someone else, spending money or deleting anything requires your approval, and the approval is enforced by Ghillie, not requested politely of the model.
• A model cannot widen its own tool or file access.
• Private work can be pinned to models that run on your Mac and never leave it.
• Every memory carries where it came from, who can see it, and whether it is still current.
• Ghillie can explain which model, tools and memories shaped an answer.

How these docs are organised

• Getting started takes you from download to your first completed task.
• Features explains the moving parts: Powers, approvals, memory, routines, projects and the agents underneath.
• Channels covers the Mac app and talking to Ghillie from Telegram or Microsoft Teams.
• Guides walks through real days with Ghillie and the security model that makes them possible.
• Reference is the lookup material.