// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Local AI Weekly #1: It's Happening
Welcome to the first issue of Local AI Weekly. A lot of It's FOSS readers have been curious about local AI but didn't want it mixed into FOSS Weekly. So here we are. A separate space for people who want to explore AI but the open source ones.
I'll be sharing experiments from my own hardware, open model news, tools worth your attention, and will keep an eye on the AI related news worth knowing. Let's get into it.
Hermes is the buzz of the AI town so I decided to give it a try. But I chose a rather unusual setup. I have the Hermes backend running on a Raspberry Pi and connecting to it via Hermes Desktop on my main machine. So the agent actually runs Pi, and I interact from my computer.
Hermes Desktop also has a voice conversation feature, most AI tools have it these days. Voice AI is shaping up to be the next big thing. Ubuntu 26.10 is already preparing native voice AI support and local tools like Vocalinux are already in development.
Seems like we're not far from AI-based desktop companions you can actually talk to. Think email briefings, task reporting, agent control. Those things are already here, even if in early stages.
Here is a new open source markdown-based knowledge base built for you and your AI agents. It is local-first, git-backed, and ships with a native MCP server, so commercial or local AI agents can read and write your notes directly.
Worth a look if you're building a personal wiki or a shared second brain your coding agents can use across sessions. Still in early stages of development, so expect bugs here and there. I am currently using Tolaria for my personal KB, and this one is my on my weekend activity list.
Another interesting open source AI tool I came across recently is Cleat. It basically runs Claude Code inside a Docker sandbox with one command, so an autonomous agent session can't touch your host system. It shares your Claude auth, edits project files, installs packages, and runs any command inside the container, but stays blocked from your SSH keys, other projects, and the rest of your machine unless you opt in.
The project is fairly new, and I don't see activities on its GitHub repo in the last three weeks. Hope it is not on the road to become an abandonware.
Kimi K3 landed on July 16 from Moonshot AI. It's a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1M token context window, released under a "Modified MIT license". It's the largest open-weight model ever released, and early benchmarks are putting it within reach of frontier closed models. Running it locally requires serious hardware, but smaller distillations should be here soon.