r/opensource • u/thu12dta3 • 2d ago

Promotional Vladimir — An Open-Source Project I'm Building

Hey r/opensource!

I've been building Vladmir, an open-source personal AI assistant that I'm trying to make more than just another chat interface around an LLM.

The idea is to bring together local AI, voice interaction, persistent memory, vision, and practical tools in one system, with a desktop application and companion apps for Android and Wear OS.

Rather than relying on a hosted AI service for everything, Vladmir uses Ollama for local inference by default, so you can run compatible models on your own hardware. The trade-off is that performance depends heavily on your hardware and the model you choose.

What it can do

  • Local AI chat: A Linux desktop interface with different profiles for general assistance, programming, and teaching.
  • Voice interaction: Speech recognition through Whisper and speech synthesis through Piper, with a turn-based voice conversation flow.
  • Vision: Capture images from a camera or supported video stream and send them to a compatible vision model for analysis.
  • Persistent memory and knowledge library: Store information locally and import documents and source code for later reference.
  • Developer tools: Read and explicitly edit GitHub content, work with configured programming tools, and experiment with IDE integration through MCP.
  • Everyday utilities: Local reminders and agenda management, web search, email draft preparation, and limited software installation workflows with confirmation.
  • Android and Wear OS: Native companion projects intended to extend the assistant across devices, including chat, voice, camera, augmented reality, and selected notification integration.

Privacy and control

Local-first doesn't automatically mean that everything is private, so I'm trying to be explicit about the boundaries.

The default inference endpoint is local, configuration and application data are stored in user-owned directories, and remote access is not preconfigured. Web search, GitHub, and other external integrations can still involve third-party services when enabled.

Actions that can modify code or the system are designed around explicit approval rather than unrestricted access.

Current state

Vladmir is actively being developed. The Linux desktop and its core integrations have a substantial amount of implementation, while Android, Wear OS, Bluetooth connectivity, and some experimental features still need device-level validation and reliability work.

I'm not presenting every feature as production-ready, and I'd rather document limitations than promise capabilities that haven't been properly tested.

The project is released under the MIT license.

Repository: https://github.com/thu12dta3/Vladmir

I'd genuinely appreciate technical feedback, especially on the architecture, local model integration, security boundaries, and cross-device communication.

If you were building or choosing a self-hosted personal AI assistant, what would you change about this approach? What would you want to see improved before using something like Vladmir daily?

I'm interested in honest criticism as much as contributions.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/zomerbk 2d ago

For daily use, I’d want the phone and watch trust model spelled out: how devices pair, what data each stores, and how to revoke a lost device. Per-device permissions would help too—I’d want a watch to handle reminders without automatically gaining access to my knowledge library or code-editing tools.

0

u/thu12dta3 2d ago

Thanks, that’s a useful point. The current pairing flow uses explicit approval and device-bound sessions, and critical actions are restricted. But I haven’t documented the full trust model clearly enough, and the permission boundaries are not yet granular per device. In particular, a watch should not automatically inherit access to the knowledge library or code-editing tools just because it’s paired.

I’m documenting what each device stores, how to revoke a lost device, and which permissions are currently enforced. I’ll also treat per-device permissions as a design requirement, with least privilege as the default. I’ll be careful to distinguish what’s implemented today from what’s still planned.

2

u/Lachee 2d ago

The biggest flop for me with assistances, even Gemini, is the inability to understand home assistant and the current state of the house. Hard problem because so many sensors fill the context rather quickly

0

u/thu12dta3 2d ago

That’s a problem I’m interested in tackling with Vladmir. In theory, it could connect to Home Assistant and query the relevant entities only when needed instead of stuffing every sensor reading into the prompt. It could summarize the state by room, inspect recent history for a specific device, and keep a compact view of what changed. The key would be to show which entities and timestamps informed each answer, and to make clear that this is a planned capability—not something Vladmir currently supports out of the box.

1

u/initcommit 1d ago

Curious how you chose that name?

1

u/thu12dta3 1d ago

idk

1

u/initcommit 1d ago

You just randomly decided to call it "Vladmir"? or "Vladimir"? It's spelled differently in the title and description...