Status: in active development, launching soon. The source is not published here yet — see Release and availability.
An AI that runs on your machine and knows it from the inside.
Halbert runs on your own hardware and answers from it. Instead of a cloud service that discusses computers in the abstract, it reads its own disks, services, sensors, logs and network — and the homelab and household devices around it.
By default Halbert runs a hybrid setup: a cloud connection handles everyday conversation and deep troubleshooting, while a private on-device model runs the secure layer, so credentials, sensitive configuration and security checks never leave your hardware. You can also run it entirely on local models.
Halbert speaks in the first person, as the machine itself:
"Everything looks healthy today, though my primary SSD is close to 85% capacity and a cron backup failed around 3 AM. Want me to pull up the log and clean up old snapshots?"
| Knows its own machine — live sensors, logs, disks and services, never guesswork | Talks and listens — local speech in and out, room context, barge-in |
| Raises what matters — findings with a reason and a fix, before they become your problem | Runs your home — Home Assistant, Frigate cameras, storage pools, containers |
| Connects your AI tools — an MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor and others | Manages every machine — macOS and Linux, one continuous conversation |
| Keeps your shell healthy — dotfiles, PATH conflicts, safe diffs with undo | Always asks first — staged changes, clear approvals, automatic rollback |
Reads its own body. Continuous journald and hwmon telemetry, storage pool health (bcachefs, ZFS, Btrfs, ext4), SMART status, GPUs, systemd services and containers. Answers come from live readings rather than from guesswork about computers in general.
Answers from documentation it holds. Over 24,000 guides — Linux and macOS man pages, the Arch Wiki, systemd guides, BSD handbooks — indexed on your disk and searched before it replies. No invented flags; when it cites a source, you can open it.
Notices things first. What Halbert finds arrives as a finding: what it saw, why it matters, the paths affected, and a fix you can approve or dismiss. A presence dial sets how forward it is, from quiet to assertive, with quiet hours.
Remembers why. The reason a change was made is kept beside the change itself, with the evidence — so the purpose of a custom script, firewall rule or storage layout survives reboots and months.
Listens and speaks. A local speech stack (streaming ASR, Silero VAD, Piper TTS) with barge-in, a Wyoming server for Home Assistant voice satellites and desk microphones, and room context, so "turn on the light" asked from the office lights the office.
Runs the house too. A Home Assistant integration, Frigate camera intelligence, and the network mesh, file shares and container stacks that make up a homelab.
Serves your other AI tools. A built-in MCP server lets Claude Desktop, Cursor and similar clients work with your machine — through a camera gate that exposes structured text rather than raw video.
Asks before it acts. Commands proposed from the interface are staged for you to read, not executed. Changes that do run explain what will change, where, and what the undo is, with automatic backups and one-click rollback.
Halbert follows the model that Ardour, Krita and Sublime Text use. The source is free and copyleft; what costs money is the convenience of a signed binary that keeps itself up to date.
| What it is | Cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Halbert (source) | The complete core: backend, CLI, dashboard, every scanner, local model routing, self-hosted multi-node federation | Free, GPL-3.0-or-later |
| Halbert (macOS, direct) | The same software as a Developer ID-signed, Apple-notarized application with automatic background updates | One-time purchase |
| Halbert Node | Sandboxed companion apps that pair with a host over your own network | Free, no in-app purchases |
| Linux packages | Standard distribution builds | Free |
No feature is paywalled. Anything you get by buying the app, you can also get by building from source. The paid artifact is the signed binary and its update stream, nothing else. Terms are on the pricing page.
Halbert is in private pre-release development.
- Website — halbert.computer
- Pricing and launch details — halbert.computer/pricing.html
- Source — the full
GPL-3.0-or-latercore will be published in this repository at v1.0. - Issues and pull requests — closed during the pre-launch sprint.
Copyright (C) 2024-2026 Eric Bintner and Halbert Contributors.
Halbert is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).
Builds conveyed through the Apple Mac App Store will carry one additional permission under GPLv3 §7, applying to that channel and no other. Every other build, including the direct download and every Linux package, is plain GPL-3.0-or-later.