About Fireside
Built by a solo developer. Backed by zero VCs and one stubborn vision.
The story
I wanted to give my grandma an AI she could actually use.
I set her up with ChatGPT. She liked it for a day. Then she came back the next morning and it had forgotten her name. She told it again. Next day — forgot again. She stopped using it.
That stuck with me. The smartest AI on the planet, and it couldn't remember a 74-year-old woman's name for more than one conversation. Every AI product I tried had the same problem — built by engineers, for engineers. No memory. No warmth. No personality.
So I built Fireside.
It's an AI companion that lives on your own hardware. You pick a pet — a cat, a penguin, a dragon — and it becomes your interface to AI. Not a widget. Not a chatbot. A companion with personality, memory, and mood. It learns from every conversation, dreams about what it learned overnight, and greets you smarter every morning.
The technology under the hood is serious: procedural memory systems, dream consolidation cycles inspired by neuroscience, adversarial stress-testing of new knowledge, multi-node mesh networking. But my grandma doesn't need to know any of that. She just needs to double-click an icon and say hello.
Principles
Your data never leaves your machine.
No cloud. No telemetry. No analytics. The AI runs on your hardware, the data stays on your disk, and nobody — including me — can see your conversations.
Complexity is my problem, not yours.
If the install takes more than 2 minutes, that's a bug. If you need to read documentation to use a feature, that's a design failure. Technology should disappear behind the experience.
Learning is the moat.
Day 1, Fireside follows instructions. Day 90, it has instinct. Even if someone copies every line of code, they start at Day 0. The accumulated intelligence specific to you is what makes Fireside yours.
Free means free.
Fireside is open source and free to use. No trial periods. No feature gates. No “upgrade to Pro to remember more than 10 conversations.” Your hardware, your AI, your rules.
By the numbers
Get in touch
Fireside is built in public. Follow the journey, report bugs, or just say hi.