I work with professional firms, law offices, real estate agencies, consultants — and noticed they all had the same problem: mountains of documents and no fast way to find answers in them. They'd spend hours digging through contracts, case files, and reports looking for a single detail. Cloud AI tools like ChatGPT could help, but these firms deal with sensitive client data. Uploading confidential legal documents or financial records to a third-party server was a non-starter. They needed AI that worked entirely on their machine. What problem were you trying to solve? Give non-technical professionals a way to chat with their documents using AI without any data leaving their computer and having to expend thousands of dollars on hardware. No cloud, no subscriptions, no IT department needed. Just install and go. How did your approach evolve? I started with a Streamlit prototype to validate the idea. It worked, but felt like a web app not a real desktop tool. I rewrote it with FastAPI + SvelteKit wrapped in a native window, so it feels like a proper application, not a browser tab. The biggest evolution was the setup experience. Early versions required users to manually install Ollama and download models from the command line. Now the app handles everything automatically, a three-step wizard that downloads and configures the AI engine behind the scenes. My goal was: if you can install Microsoft Word, you can install YourLocalAI.

YourLocalAI

Desktop RAG app, 100% offline, zero cloud, no subscriptions.

Desktop RAG app, 100% offline, zero cloud, no subscriptions.