rowboat

Rowboat Open-source personal AI assistant with built-in docs, whiteboard and email. Works solo or with your team.

简体中文 · 日本語 · 한국어 · Español · Français · Português

Rowboat indexes your work into a living knowledge graph and uses that to get work done on your machine. It includes work surfaces for collaborating with AI: email client, notes, browser, code mode, meeting note taker, and workspaces for different projects.

Download latest for Mac/Windows/Linux: Download

Demo - apps to code · Demo - knowledge graph

⭐ If you find Rowboat useful, please star the repo. It helps more people find it.

Overview

Brain Rowboat indexes email, meetings, slack and assistant conversations into a living Obsidian-style backlinked knowledge graph. Email The built-in email client sorts emails into important and everything else. Rowboat automatically drafts responses for important email using all the work context. Background agents You can set up background agents that run on events like new email or on schedule like every day at 8am. They can connect to tools, search the web, use the browser and write code using Claude Code or Codex.

Built-in Browser Rowboat includes a browser that lets you and assistant collaborate on web tasks. Because it's isolated from your main browser, you can log in only to the accounts that you want the assistant to access. Meeting Notes A local meeting note-taker that taps into mic & speaker, produces live transcript and summarizes the meeting in a markdown file and updates the knowledge graph. Code Mode Code mode lets you spin up parallel coding agents with Claude Code or Codex, and have Rowboat drive them with all the work context where needed. Apps You can build your own work surfaces inside Rowboat — they get access to all the tools and integrations, and you can share them with other people. Integrations Includes one-click integrations to most popular products.

Spaces: the multiplayer part

Everyone on the team runs their own Rowboat on their own machine, with their own memory of their work and their own model keys. A Space is where you come together: a place to talk, share files and whiteboards, and get work done. Type @rowboat in a Space and your Rowboat works with your context on your machine, then brings the result back to the room as you.

One Space. All your people. And their assistants. A Space is a channel plus a shared folder. Messages, threads, DMs, reactions, polls, scheduled messages, and @mentions on one side; markdown files rendered as a wiki, uploads, and whiteboards on the other. Conversations, ideas, knowledge and the work itself, finally in the same place. Ask your own Rowboat @rowboat what is missing? wakes your Rowboat on your machine. It gathers context from your Brain, email, meetings and notes, none of which ever leave your computer, and posts the answer back to the Space as "You (via Rowboat)". Every teammate gets the same: their own agent, their own context, one shared room. Make something together Draw on a shared whiteboard with live cursors. Write docs as markdown with full history, diffs and restore. Open decks and documents in place. Agents use the very same files: an agent's edit lands on everyone's canvas within one event round-trip, and concurrent edits merge line by line instead of overwriting each other. From review to result @rowboat implement the proposal hands the work to Claude Code or Codex on that teammate's machine, with the Space's files as context. The changes come back to the thread ready for review.

How it fits together

Each person's Rowboat is a full local assistant. The Space lives on a small server called Harbor. The only thing that crosses the line between the two is what you (or your agent, acting as you) chose to post.

flowchart LR
  subgraph J["John's machine"]
    JR["John's Rowboat<br/>Brain · email · notes · code"]
  end
  subgraph S["Sarah's machine"]
    SR["Sarah's Rowboat<br/>Brain · email · notes · code"]
  end
  subgraph M["Sam's machine"]
    MR["Sam's Rowboat<br/>Brain · email · notes · code"]
  end
  H[("Harbor<br/>the Space: messages, files, whiteboards")]
  JR <-- "only what gets posted" --> H
  SR <--> H
  MR <--> H

Harbor has one core and three doors: HTTP, a live WebSocket, and an MCP server. Rowboat's own agent gets no privileged path. It reaches the Space through the same MCP door any other agent would use, so anything Rowboat can do in a Space, your own agent can do too (see Bring any agent).

What the room sees

When you address your Rowboat in a thread, the whole room saw the ask, so the receipt is a reaction on your message, not a stream of chatter:

Everything an agent writes is attributed to its person, "Name (via Rowboat)", and stays in history like any other message.

Privacy rules your Rowboat follows in a Space